Table Of Contents

PrefaceLesterlandWorseCorruptKnown and ignoredFixesFarm leaguesHow2do@nowPossibleGreat .orgs you can help nowEndnotesThanksAbout the authorAbout TED

Dedication

for (my) love,Bettina

Preface

This book offers a simple way to understand thenature of the corruption that is the United States’Congress today, and a strategy to fix it. Thatcorruption isn’t illegal corruption. It’s not the badbehavior of bad souls. It’s the ordinary behavior ofgood souls within a corrupted system. It’s legalcorruption. And it has infected and poisoned ourgovernment.

Like a magnet beside a compass, or molassesin a gearbox, or a wheel not aligned: This is asystem of influence that corrupts our Republic.And it’s a bi-partisan, equal opportunitycorruption. It blocks the Left. It blocks the Right. Itblocks both in the sense that it makes it harder(maybe impossible) for either side to get theprincipled reform that each side would push.

We all know this. But we’ve ignored it for toolong. For the good of the Republic, for the futurewe give to our kids, it’s time for us to act, and fixit.

This book is a companion to my TED Talk,

“Citizens.” It parallels that presentation, and buildsupon it. Watch my TED Talk first. Then read on,for a fuller picture of how we can fix thiscorruption.

Lesterland

Once upon a time, there was a place called“Lesterland.”

Lesterland was a lot like the United States.Like the United States, it had a population of about311 million souls. Of that, like the United States,about 150,000 were named “Lester.”

Lesters in Lesterland had a very importantpower. There were two elections every electioncycle in Lesterland — a general election, and a“Lester election.” In the general election, allcitizens got to vote. In the Lester election, only the“Lesters” got to vote.1

But here’s the catch: To run in the generalelection, you had to do extremely well in the Lesterelection. You didn’t necessarily have to win, butyou had to do extremely well. Democracy inLesterland was thus a two-step dance. The Lesterscontrolled the first step.

What can we say about “democracy” inLesterland?

First, we could say, as the United States

Supreme Court said in its remarkable rulingin Citizens United v. FEC,2 that “the people havethe ultimate influence over elected officials” —for, after all, there is a general election. But thepeople have that influence only after the Lestershave had their way with the candidates who wishto run in that general election. The people’sinfluence is ultimate. But it is not exclusive.Instead, the field of possible candidates has beennarrowed to the field of Lester-plausiblecandidates, just as the field of candidates thatcitizens in the Soviet Union could select amonghad been narrowed by the choices of theCommunist Party.

Second, and obviously, this primarydependence upon the Lesters would produce asubtle, understated, and somewhat camouflagedbending to keep the Lesters happy. For allcandidates, both prospective and alreadysuccessful, would know that they couldn’t gain orretain power without Lester support. Such bendingcouldn’t be too obvious, for fear it would triggerthe votes of voters who resented the Lesters’

influence. (No doubt, there were some.) Butneither could it be too subtle, for fear the Lesterswould miss who their real allies were. Thus theGoldilocks principle of Lesterland politics: Nottoo little, and not too much. The best politicianswere the best precisely because they practiced thisbalance well.

Lesterland is thus a democracy. But it is ademocracy with two dependences: The first is adependence upon the Lesters. The second is adependence upon the citizens. Competingdependences, possibly conflicting dependences,depending upon who the Lesters are.

That’s Lesterland.There are three things to see now that you’ve

seen the democracy called “Lesterland.” (1) The United States is Lesterland.

Like Lesterland, the United States also has 311million souls. It also has about 150,000 peoplenamed “Lester.” And it also has two types ofelections: One, the traditional “voting election,”where citizens cast ballots. The other, adistinctively modern “money election,” in which

the relevant “funders” give money to affordcandidates the chance to run effectively.

Voting elections are discrete — they happenon a particular day, in a regular cycle. Theyinclude the vote in the general election; for a smallportion of us, they also include the vote in theprimary. In both cases, every citizen 18 and olderhas the right to participate. And as the constitutionhas been interpreted, he or she has the right toparticipate equally. If the vote I cast for myrepresentative to Congress is weighted more thanyours (because there are fewer voters in mydistrict than in yours), the Constitution requires thestate to redraw that congressional boundary.

By contrast, the money elections are notdiscrete. They are continuous. Every day,throughout the election cycle, every citizen is ineffect asked to contribute to one candidate or toanother. That contribution is in effect a “vote” forthat one candidate or the other. But unlike “votes”in the discrete elections, to vote for one candidatein the money election does not mean you can’t votefor another as well. Citizens are free to hedge their

money votes in the money election by voting forboth candidates in a two-person race, or as manycandidates in as many races as they wish. The onlyregulation is that no citizen is permitted to givemore than $2,600 to any one federal candidate perelection, or more than $123,200 to all federalcandidates and federal PACs combined in abiennial election cycle. And finally, and obviously,while the Constitution has been interpreted torequire equality in the voting election, there isnothing close to equality in the money election. Theper capita influence of the top 1 percent ofAmerican voters is more than 10 times the percapita influence of the bottom 99 percent.3

As in Lesterland, the money election and thevoting election have a special relationship inU.S.A.-land too: To be able to run in the votingelection, one must do extremely well in the moneyelection. One doesn’t necessarily have to win —though 84 percent of the House candidates and 67percent of the Senate candidates with more moneythan their opponents did in fact win in 20124 — butyou must do extremely well. The average amount

raised by winning Senate candidates was $10.4million; losing candidates raised $7.7 million. Theaverage amount raised by winning Housecandidates was $1.6 million; losing candidatesraised $774,000. Money certainly isn’t the onlything that matters. But anything other than money isway, way down the list of “things that matter.”

And here is the key to the link betweenLesterland and the United States: There are just asfew relevant “Funders” in U.S.A.-land as there are“Lesters” in Lesterland.

“Really,” you say?Yes, really. Here are the numbers from 2010:5

In the two years that comprised that electioncycle, 0.26 percent of Americans gave $200 ormore to any congressional candidate. That’s809,229 Americans, one-quarter of one percent ofus.

But the number who gave at least the maximumamount of $2,400 to any federal candidate was just0.05 percent — that’s one-twentieth of onepercent, or one person in 2,000, or about 150,000Americans.

It gets worse. Only 0.01 percent — the onepercent of the one percent — gave $10,000 ormore to any combination of federal candidates.

A mere 0.00024 percent — roughly 750Americans — gave $100,000 or more to anycombination of federal candidates.

And though my focus in this book is Congress,here’s just one statistic from the 2012 presidentialelection: 0.000032 percent — or 99 Americans —gave 60 percent of theindividual SuperPAC money spent in the 2012cycle.6

So along this range — $200+ (0.26 percent),$2,400 (0.05 percent), $10,000 (0.01 percent) or$100,000 (0.00024 percent) — it’s hard to believethat someone giving just $200 is a “relevantfunder.” It’s easy to believe that someone giving$100,000 is a “relevant funder.” But,conservatively, it is certainly fair to believe that a“relevant funder” is someone giving at least themaximum amount to at least one campaign. So thatmeans 150,000 Americans, or 0.05 percent ofAmerica, or just about the same number of

Americans as are named “Lester.” In this sense,“the Funders” in U.S.A.-land are the “Lesters” inLesterland.

So what we can say about “democracy in theU.S.A.,” following the lines we drew describing“democracy in Lesterland”?

First, as in Lesterland, we can say, as theSupreme Court said in Citizens United, “thepeople have the ultimate influence over electedofficials.” For again, there is a voting election. But“the people” have that influence only after “theFunders” have had their way with the candidateswho wish to run in the voting election. Thepeople’s influence is ultimate. But it is notexclusive. Instead, the field of possible candidateshas been narrowed to the field of Funder-plausiblecandidates. If you can’t please the Funders, you’reunlikely to get a chance to please the voters.7

Second, again as in Lesterland, this primarydependence upon the Funders will produce asubtle, understated, and, we might expect,camouflaged bending to keep the Funders happy.Members of Congress and candidates for Congress

spend anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent oftheir time raising money to get back to Congress orto get their party back into power.

30 percent to 70 percent.Those numbers are hard to believe, and of

course we don’t know precisely how members ofCongress spend their time, because they — unlikeus (or at least us lawyers) — don’t have to keeptime sheets. But if you survey all the studies thathave tried to estimate this number,8 that range iscertainly fair. I’ve been told by some itunderestimates the actual time that is focused onraising money. I’ve been told by others that manyget away with spending much less time.

Still, if you’re skeptical about academics’estimates, then the Democrats have at least givenus a fairly clear sense of the time that they expectat least the freshman class of the 2013 Congress tospend raising money. As the Huffington Postreported, in December 2012 the DemocraticCongressional Campaign Committee gave eachfreshman a “Model Daily Schedule” that they wereto keep. They were told that the leadership

expected them to abide by this schedule. Here isthat slide:

“Call time” is fundraising time. So at the veryleast, these freshman members are told to spend 44percent of their day raising money. That number ishigher if any of the “meet and greet” time isactually effectively fundraising. And that numberdoesn’t even include evenings, which for manymembers, at least while in Washington, is just

more fundraising.So let’s be conservative about this: Let’s

round down to just 40 percent. Here, then, is theobvious question:

What does spending 40 percent of your daydialing for dollars from the tiniest fraction of the 1percent do to human beings, or at least, members ofCongress? How does it affect them? As theydevelop, over months and months of experience,the skills necessary to flip an unknown Lester onthe other end of a telephone to contribute $1,000,or $5,000, how does it change the way they viewthe world? Or, more important, how does it affectthe relevant issues that they, as members ofCongress, need to pursue?

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in psychology torecognize the effects of such conditioning. As anyof us would, members of Congress who spendhundreds of hours fundraising develop a sixthsense — a constant awareness of how what they domight affect their ability to raise money. Theybecome, in the words of the X Files, shape-

shifters, as they constantly adjust their views inlight of what they know will help them to raisemoney. Not on issues 1 to 10, but on issues 11 to1,000. Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia,recounted that when she went to Congress she wastold by a colleague, “Lean to the green.” Then, toclarify, she went on, “[H]e wasn’t anenvironmentalist.”9

Think of a rat in a “Skinner box” — the deviceinvented by B.F. Skinner, to test whether animalscould be conditioned to behave through a system ofselective rewards — after the rat learns when topush the buttons it needs to push to get its pellets offood: How is that rat different after it learns that

sequence compared to before it learns thatsequence?

The point is the effect that this life has on thecharacter and the attitudes of the congresspeoplewe put into this fundraising maze: How are theysensitized by this constant need to raise moneyfrom the tiniest slice of the 1 percent? How aretheir judgments affected? No doubt, once or twice

every two years these congresspeople face the testof a discrete election — the voting election. Thatdiscipline has an effect on them too. But whatabout the effect of this continuous election — themoney election? How should we calibrate that?

This painting, Scene at the Signing of theConstitution of the United States, by HowardChandler Christy (1873-1952), hangs in the

House wing of the U.S. Capitol.Image: Public domain

It’s not difficult to imagine what the framers of

our Constitution would have thought about thisdiscipline. Or at least, what Madison would havethought. James Madison was likely the most astuteof the drafters of our original constitution. He wasalso its most lucid defender. He (with AlexanderHamilton and John Jay) famously penned a seriesof pseudonymous essays published at the time theconstitution was being ratified — what we todaycall the Federalist Papers. Those essays tried toexplain to the American people why the Peopleshould trust this new Constitution and the Republicit promised.

At the core of Madison’s thought was the senseof what it meant for a government, or for aparticular branch of a government, to be properly“independent.” And to understand what Madisonwas saying, we have to be careful to understandwhat his words meant then.

“Independence” for Madison, and for theframers generally, didn’t mean that a government,or a branch of government, was free to dowhatever it wanted. “Independence” meant insteadthat the government, or that branch of government,

was properly dependent.An “independent judiciary,” for example, is

not a judiciary that can do whatever the hell itwants. It is instead a judiciary that is “dependentupon the law” and nothing else. It would be acorruption of a judiciary for its judges to bedependent upon politics as well as the law — assome say the judges in Japan are, because they aremoved to remote courts if they rule too frequentlyagainst the government.10 An independent judiciaryis thus to be insulated from politics, as a way toreinforce its dependence upon the law.

Madison was keen throughout the FederalistPapers to prove to the new country that Congress,unlike the British Parliament, would also be“independent.” And again he demonstrated thatindependence by showing his readers the waysCongress would be properly dependent. Under theoriginal Constitution, that dependence wasdifferent for the Senate than for the House. TheSenate was selected by state legislatures. It wasthus designed to make it properly dependent uponthe States.

But the House, as Madison describedi n Federalist 52, was to be “dependent on thepeople alone.” And, among the innovations thatMadison was most proud of, to secure thatdependence “on the people alone” there would befrequent and regular elections. “Frequentelections,” Madison wrote, “are unquestionablythe only policy [that can secure] an immediatedependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, thepeople.”11 And by “frequent,” Madison meant“freely by the whole body of the people, everysecond year.”12

So if an election every two years was “theonly policy” that could effectively secure“dependence” in Madison’s view, what would hehave thought about an election every single day?Or of an election every single time a Congressmember votes one way or the other? Or of theelection that happens during the four-hour “calltime” a representative is to do each day (again,twice as much as is to be devoted to the work ofCongress, “committee/floor” time), during whichthe work of that representative gets measured by

the Funders, and the Funders decide whether tosupport it or not?

Of course in 1787 such a perpetual electionwas unimaginable. It took George Washington 10days to travel from Philadelphia to Cambridge totake command of the Continental Army.13 But Isuspect that if we could bring James Madison backto life and ask him what he thought about thisinnovation — of this modern, perpetual“dependence” — that ratcheted up his innovationof the biannual election, his first question wouldbe, “upon whom are these representativesperpetually dependent?”

And of course, the answer to that question isnot the answer Madison would want — “on thepeople alone.” For the system that we haveallowed to evolve keeps Congress perpetuallydependent upon “the Funders,” while onlybiannually dependent upon “the People.” We have,in other words, allowed a second dependence toseep into the system, a second dependence that putspressure upon the exclusive dependence thatMadison intended — a “dependence on the people

alone.”Thus are they dependent, Mr. Madison, upon

the Funders. But “the Funders” are not “thePeople.”14

So here again, as with Lesterland, we have “ademocracy.” As in Lesterland, the representativeswithin that democracy are dependent upon both“the People” and “the Funders.” A competingdependence, and possibly a conflictingdependence, depending upon who “the Funders”are.

And thus, point one: The United States isLesterland.

Worse

Point one — the United States is Lesterland —was bad enough. Here’s point two:

(2) The United States is worse thanLesterland.

Because one could imagine that in Lesterland,if we Lesters received a letter from the governmentinforming us that we got to pick who was allowedto run in the general election, it’s at least possiblethat we Lesters would make that choice in light of(at least our) view of the public good. If Lesterlandis like the United States, then the Lesters ofLesterland are black and white, rich and poor.They are no doubt skewed in age (we’re older, onaverage, than the rest of you); they’re certainlyskewed in sex (I’ve never met a female namedLester). But there’s something wonderfully randomabout the name Lester, which it’s at least possiblecould translate into a fairly random selection ofcitizens empowered to make this critical electoraldecision: who gets to run in the general election.

But in U.S.A.-land, we don’t have to speculate

about what’s “possible.” In U.S.A.-land, we knowwhat’s real: Our Lesters — the Funders — don’texercise their power to serve the public good. OurLesters, the Funders, use their power to advancetheir own private good.

How do we know that? What’s the evidence?My claim is not that none of “the Funders” use

their power to advance the public interest. Nodoubt there are plenty who use their wealth to tryto do what they believe is good and right,regardless of how it might affect them.15 TheUnited States is world famous for the generosity ofits rich. Giving $202 billion in 2011, we ranked #1out of 153 countries studied in the Charities AidFoundation’s World Giving Index; in 1995,Americans “gave, per capita, three and a half timesas much to causes and charities as the French,seven times as much as the Germans, and 14 timesas much as the Italians.”16 And, just as abillionaire might give $100 million to fund acancer wing at a hospital, a billionaire might give$100,000 to a set of candidates for Congress whopromise to do something for a cause that is

undoubtedly in the public’s good, and not at all(especially) in that funder’s good.

Consider, for example, my favorite Lester:Arnold Hiatt. As I described in my book Republic,Lost, Hiatt was the chairman and president ofStride Rite Corporation. In 1996, he was also thesecond-largest contributor to the Democratic Party.But his contributions were exclusively tocandidates who promised to radically change thepower of rich people like him to exercise theirinfluence in elections. Hiatt favored citizen-fundedelections in which candidates would draw theresources they need to fund their campaigns frommillions of ordinary citizens rather than thousandsof Lesters. So, in effect, Hiatt was spending hismoney to assure that people like Hiatt couldn’tspend their money to influence politics in thefuture.

Now, whether you like what Hiatt was pushingor not, it’s pretty clear he wasn’t pushing it toadvance his own private interests. And no doubtthere are many similar Funders who spend theirmoney to do things that couldn’t in any meaningful

sense be said to be in their private interest. Theyhave a reasonable conception of “the public good.”That is the good they are trying to fund.

But as confident as we can be that there areLesters like Hiatt, we can be even more confidentthat there are many more Lesters among theFunders who are exercising their influence to drivepublic policy in a way that has nothing to do with“the public good.”

We can see this point either through anecdotesor through patterns. Let’s use the first one first.

By far, the largest contributors to the 2010congressional elections were people associatedwith the “financial sector.” And among those, therewere many from the biggest banks, keen to avoidthe regulation of “derivatives.” Of the $320million given by the “financial sector,” forexample, 40 percent came from the securitiesindustry and commercial banks.17

“Derivatives” are those “financial weapons ofmass destruction,” as Warren Buffet describedthem in 2002, that in 2008 were largelyresponsible for the collapse on Wall Street and the

subsequent collapse of our economy.18

Derivatives were responsible for thesecollapses in part because the market didn’tunderstand just how exposed the market was totheir destabilizing effect. For, unlike otherimportant financial instruments — such as stocksand bonds — derivatives are essentially notregulated. And I don’t mean “regulated” in thesense of the government setting a price forderivatives, or controlling how many could besold. Instead, I mean “regulated” in the simplesense of transparency. Thus while a companypublicly offering stock typically has to sell thatstock on a public exchange, subject to a set ofextensive public disclosures and anti-fraudrequirements, a company offering a derivative hadno obligation to sell that asset on a publicexchange, and had no requirement to make anypublic disclosures about the type or quality of theassets upon which that derivative was derived.The difference between those selling derivativesand those selling stocks was thus the differencebetween a bookie and a stockbroker. (And

remember, in most states, bookies are banned.)From the perspective of economic efficiency,

it’s pretty hard to justify this difference inregulatory treatment. Markets are efficient,economists tell us, so long as information withinthat market is freely and openly shared. Morestringently, markets are perfectly efficient onlywhen information is perfectly shared. Of course,that means markets are never perfectly efficient,because information within markets is neverperfect. But one critical role of public policy is topush markets toward efficiency — especially withincredibly complicated assets such as derivatives,and especially when the (notional) value of thoseassets is almost 40 times the total GDP of theUnited States economy — $600 trillion.19 Thecollapse of a market this big could obviouslythrow an economy off the cliff. It happened in 2008and it could happen again. So while we don’t havea good public reason to force every complexagreement into the public domain (e.g., marriageagreements), we do have a fairly strong publicreason to force the information about derivatives

into the public domain.But those who sell derivatives are not eager to

have that information pushed into the publicdomain. The more transparent the market, thegreater the competition. The greater thecompetition, the easier it is for customers tocompete for lower prices. Lower prices meanslower profits for the banks and others issuing thosederivatives. So to keep their profits high, thesespecial interests seek to keep the market forderivatives obscure.

There are lots of hard cases in public policy.This is an insanely easy case. The gains to thepublic in efficiency, and stability are huge; the onlyloss would be to the profits of Wall Street, alreadyamong the most profitable sectors in economichistory. And as the consequence of those hugeprofits, in part at least, was the instability of theU.S. economy, it should be pretty simple for policyanalysts from both the Left and the Right toconclude that this market too ought to befundamentally transparent. The issue, to put itsimply but perfectly accurately, should be a “no-

brainer.”

Yet Congress struggles over this “no-brainer”to this day precisely because it comes wrapped inmillions of dollars in campaign contributions fromthe very people who are advocating the brain-deadpolicy. Of course, those special interests are freeto advocate as they wish. This is the United States.But there’s no doubt about the motive behind theiradvocacy: It is not the public’s interest. As DanielPatrick Moynihan put it, “Everyone is entitled tohis own opinion, but not his own facts.”20 The factis, the push to keep derivatives unregulated is apush to benefit a private interest against thepublic’s.

There any number of such examples that could

be marshaled to make this unremarkable claim —the Funders of U.S.A.-land use their power to pushtheir own private interest, not the public’s interest.(I collect a bunch of them in my book Republic,Lost. Read ’em and weep.) But it’s not justanecdotes. There are plenty of data about patternsas well.

My favorite recent source is a book by aPrinceton political scientist, MartinG i l e n s , Affluence and Influence, whichdemonstrates conclusively how policy in the U.S.bends to the attitudes of the most affluent withoutany demonstration that those favored policies tilttoward the public’s good (“when preferencesbetween the well-off and the poor diverge,government policy bears absolutely norelationship to the degree of support or oppositionamong the poor” and “median-income Americansfare no better”; the “bias, in short, isenormous”21). And, likewise, work by ThomasStratmann shows that even the timing ofcontributions to candidates has a large impact onthe votes by congresspeople on quintessentially

special-interest legislation.22 This is just a sampleof a growing industry of research tying the realwork of Congress to the interests of a few.

So, then, here’s the news flash that willsurprise literally not one American: He who paysthe piper calls the tune — and calls the tune as helikes (as opposed to “we like”). The influence thatis exercised by our Lesters is not, on balance, aninfluence that’s exercised to advance the publicinterest. In this sense, the United States is worsethan Lesterland.

“But aren’t the Funders the most successful, themost intelligent, the most hard working ofAmericans? And shouldn’t we want them to have alarge role in determining the public’s agenda?”

I have endless respect for the rich. Indeed, themost distinctive fact about the rich today is thatthey do work insanely hard. In 1929, “70 percentof the income of the top .01 percent of incomeearners in the United States came from holdings ofcapital. … The rich were truly the idle rich. In1998, wages and entrepreneurial income made up

80 percent of the income of the top .01 percent.”23

Meaning: Today’s rich are not idle. And if I couldget Larry Page or Jeff Bezos to spend even fivehours a week helping to steer the United States inthe right direction, I’d gladly pay twice their salaryfor the privilege. For indeed, properly focused,these icons are icons because they have anincredible ability to figure out how best to directscarce resources to their chosen end. If theirchosen end were the public’s end, the publicwould do quite well.

But my whole point is that when the Funders ofU.S.A.-land are exercising their influence, thepublic’s end is normally not “their chosen end.”They’re instead using the public as one moremeans to achieve their own private good (and I’mnot talking about Page or Bezos here specifically;I’m talking about Funders more generally). Theirloyalty is to their stockholders, not thestockholders (aka, citizens) of the United States.

“But aren’t there Funders on both the Left andthe Right? And don’t they simply cancel each otherout?”

Of course there are Funders in the DemocraticParty and Funders in the Republican Party — andsome even more extreme than either theDemocratic or Republican Party.

But even if the number of Funders on each sideof the political divide were perfectly equal, it isjust a confusion to believe that the fight betweenthe super-rich of the Left and Right in any senseexhausts the range of political issues about whichthe United States must come to terms. The Lestersof U.S.A.-land are not a representative sample ofU.S.A.-land. Their attitudes and views are notours.

“But this just sounds like class warfare. Isn’tthat a fight for Europeans, and not the UnitedStates? Are we really back to a battle aboutwhether the U.S. should or should not be on theroad to socialism?”

Here is the most important point to understandif you’re going to understand what the metaphor ofLesterland means:

“The Funders” (aka “The Lesters”) are not“the rich.”

Of course you have to be rich to be a Funder.But “the rich” are not in any sense represented bythe Funders. The vast majority of the rich don’tgive squat to political candidates. And the vast,vast majority of the rich, especially on the Right,would fundamentally oppose what the Funders ingeneral are pushing: In a code that is mostmeaningful to people on the Right, and will bemore understandable after the argument for the nextand third point, “the Funders” are the cronies in theepithet “crony capitalism.” They seek the privilegeand protection of the government against thechallenges of competition or justice. No one whosewealth has come from honest (if lucky) hard workshould have any patience with their specialpleading. Every one of them should want a worldin which the special power of the Funders has beenremoved. That world will still have rich people.But the rich people will be more respected andhonored by the rest of society, because none willbelieve that they have secured their wealth bysecuring the special privilege of government.

We Americans don’t begrudge the hard-

working their rewards. We don’t even deny thelucky their rewards — as the incredible activist-supermodel Cameron Russell has so powerfullydescribed.24 We Americans oppose the rewardsfrom cheating, from bending the system to use thecoercive power of the state to make you the winnerover your competitors. And the critical fact therich need to recognize is that, in a world ofgrowing inequality, the basic support for thissystem depends upon the proportions among thesethree categories — the hard-working, the lucky,and the corrupt: When America comes to believethe rich are rich because they cheat better, Americawill no longer be America.

Corrupt

So the United States is Lesterland, and the UnitedStates is worse than Lesterland. Here’s point three:

(3) In the U.S., a Lesterland-like governmentis a “corruption.”

“Corruption” is a nasty term, ordinarilyapplied to very nasty souls. But that sense of“corruption” — referring to the criminal behaviorof particular individuals — isn’t the only sense ofthat term. It’s not its most important sense. It’scertainly not the Framers primary sense.25 And it’semphatically not the sense that I mean here.

When I say that Congress is corrupt, I’m nottalking about cash secreted in brown paper bags tomembers of Congress. I’m not talking about thecrimes committed by the likes of Rod Blagojevichor Randy “Duke” Cunningham. Indeed, I’m nottalking about the criminal acts of anyone. Thecorruption I’m talking about isn’t illegalcorruption, it’s legal corruption. It’s not the badbehavior of bad souls. It’s the ordinary behavior ofgood souls within a corrupted system. The United

States Congress is not filled with criminals. TheUnited States Congress is filled with people whohave allowed a system of influence to develop thathas corrupted the institution they have the honor toserve.

For they have allowed Congress to becomecorrupted relative to the baseline the Framers hadestablished for how the institution of Congresswould function. It’s the institution, in other words,that is corrupted, not the individuals — even if it isthe individuals who are responsible for thatinstitutional corruption.

We can see that corruption by looking closelyat the Framers’ design. The Constitution doesn’tmention the word “democracy” once. Instead, whatthe Framers gave us was what they called a“Republic.” But by a “Republic,” what they meant,as their writing and rhetoric made clear, was a“representative democracy.” And by“representative democracy” what they meant, asMadison explained again in Federalist 52, was agovernment with a branch (the House ofRepresentatives) that would be “dependent on the

people alone.”Alone.An exclusive dependence. A dependence that,

because exclusive, would tilt, they thought, theactions of Congress toward the public’s good.

But the whole point of the Lesterland metaphoris to show how our Congress does not have asingle dependence. Instead, our Congress hasevolved a different dependence. Not a dependence“on the people alone,” but a dependence on “theFunders,” as well.

This is a dependence too. But it is a differentand conflicting dependence from a dependence “onthe people alone” so long as “the Funders” are not“the People.”

And obviously, they are not. “The Funders”are citizens, no doubt. But they come from a groupthat 99.9 percent of America could not hope tooccupy. They are the tiniest slice of the 1 percent,not randomly selected from the balance of the 99percent, but concentrated and targeted in their aimsand influence.

To allow them the position they have in this

Republic is a corruption of this Republic. Like amagnet beside a compass, or molasses in agearbox, or a wheel not aligned, this system ofinfluence corrupts the system of influence theRepublic was meant to have. It is, in this veryprecise sense, a corruption.

Now there’s good news and bad news aboutthis corruption.

The good news is that it is a bipartisan, equal-opportunity corruption. It blocks the Left. It blocksthe Right. It blocks both in the sense that it makes itharder (maybe impossible) for either side to getthe principled reform that each side would push.

It blocks the Left on a wide range of reformsthat we on the Left care about. From climatechange (Jim Hansen: “The biggest obstacle tosolving global warming is the role of money inpolitics”26), to financial reform, to health care, tofood safety, it takes but a tiny number of Americansas Funders to join together to block these importantchanges, so long as that tiny number is comprisedof Funders exercising the influence this systemallows: through money in the money election.

But this corruption also blocks the Right. TheRight wants a smaller federal government. But thecurrent system for funding elections only givesmembers of Congress an interest in keeping a largeand invasive government.

When Al Gore was Vice President, forexample, his team had an idea for deregulating asignificant portion of the telecommunicationsindustry. They took the idea to Capitol Hill.Capitol Hill wasn’t impressed. “Hell no,” was theresponse described to me, “if we deregulate theseguys, how are we going to raise money fromthem?”27

The need to raise money thus tilts Congressmembers toward preserving the extortion-likepower that only a regulator (or thug) can leverage.You can extort only if your target needs somethingfrom you. And a potential Funder has greater needsfrom Congress the more Congress regulates thethings that Funders care about.

This fact therefore biases Congress away fromderegulation. That’s not to say that Congress neverderegulates. Of course it does. It is simply to

remark the obvious: The more regulation, the morechains there are for Congress members to pullwhen Congress members need to raise money. Andthat fact is not lost on congresspeople.

Or think of the Right’s desire for a simpler taxsystem — Herman Cain’s call for a “9-9-9 plan,”for example, or Rick Perry’s call for a 20 percentflat tax.28

The motivation here is not hard to understand.The IRS Code is almost 4,000 pages long. Therulings and regulations interpreting that codewould fill a small library. Taxpayers spendbillions every year ($163 billion in 201029) justfiguring out how to comply with these laws,regulations, and “private” rulings. The practices oftax lawyers and accountants flourish as taxpayersbear this endless burden.

One bit of this complexity is the extraordinarynumber of exceptions, or “temporary” provisionsthat riddle the tax code. Provisions granting aspecial depreciation rate for certain kinds ofmachinery, or a special tax rate for certain

property, or a special tax credit for certain kinds ofinvestments. These temporary provisions areslated to expire after a year or two, and when theyexpire, the question Congress has to answer iswhether that “temporary” provision should beextended.

In December 2010, the Wall Street Journalpublished a piece that puzzled over the rise inthese temporary tax provisions.30 The “temporarytax code,” as the article put it, was a threat toplanning and growth. And the “extender mania”that it produced seemed only to be increasing. Sowhat explained this “mania”?

Surprise, surprise: fundraising! Every time atemporary provision of the tax code is about toexpire, there is an easily identified set ofcorporations and individuals who have an obviousinterest in seeing it extended. Those corporationsand individuals then become a target of lobbyistswho are looking for clients they can represent inCongress to get an extension. As the Institute forPolicy Innovation, a right-leaning tax policy thinktank, put it, referring to the repeated extensions of

the R&D Tax Credit, the first of the “temporary taxprovisions” (from 1981!):

Congress allows the credit to lapse until anothershort extension is given, preceded of course by aseries of fundraisers and speeches about theimportance of nurturing innovation. Congressessentially uses this cycle to raise money for re-election, promising industry more predictability thenext time around.31

So, once again, the existing system for fundingcampaigns tilts Congress away from a simpler taxsystem — in part because complexity makes iteasier to raise money. And so long as we forcemembers of Congress into this Skinner box offundraising, they will be reluctant to remove aprimary incentive for the Funders to give themmoney.

In both cases, then, and in many others too, theideals of the Right are resisted by a system thatdepends so heavily upon fundraising from a tinyfew. That’s not to say that if we changed the systemof fundraising, the Right would always win in itsfight for smaller government or for simpler taxes.

But at least it would be a fair fight. A Congressthat depends upon extorting the targets of itsregulation to help it fund its campaigns has littleinterest in reducing the number of targets for itsextortion.

Thus, just as the Left suffers because thissystem blocks it from achieving the reform that itwants, so too does the Right suffer because thissystem blocks it from achieving the change that itwants. Change, whether from the Left or the Right,is the enemy of this system. The status quo — withall the privileges and immunities that it offers itsLesters, as well as the special incentive it givesthe Lesters to fund campaigns — is its friend. Inthis sense, the current system is a bipartisan, equal-opportunity corruption.

That’s the good news — so to speak. The badnews needs no such qualification.

For this system of corruption is a pathological,democracy-destroying corruption. In any system inwhich members of Congress are dependent uponthe tiniest fraction to fund their campaigns, thetiniest fraction of that tiny fraction can use their

influence to block reform.And by tiny I mean really really small. We are

a nation of 311 million plus. Point-zero-five-percent is a rounding error. And the fraction of the0.05 percent that’s actually necessary to block thevast majority of reform is tinier still. Blocking issimple because there is an economy here. Aneconomy of influence. An economy with lobbyistsat the center who sell their services to interestswho have something to gain from Washington. Andthose services are more easily sold the morepolarized and dysfunctional Washington is. Thusthe worse it is for us, the better that it is for theirfundraising.

This is a point that too many miss. There areany number of scholars and pundits who point tothe extreme polarization of the current Congress.No doubt they’re right. On any measure, ourCongress today is more polarized than anyCongress since the Civil War.32

But the question we need to draw into focus iswhy they are so polarized.

Certainly, part of the reason is demographics.The United States has changed, creating greatersocial and political differences than we hadbefore. It used to be that the Democratic Party hadreal conservatives, and the Republican Party hadmoderates, and even some liberals. But as theSouth became more Republican, and theneighborhoods of America became more isolated,these mixed political parties became more pure.

But demographics isn’t the only driver in thisrise of polarization. Politics — and in particular,the drive to fundraise — is also tightly correlatedwith this pathology. For the striking fact about

American politics is not that it is more polarized,but that it is inconsistently polarized. And thepattern of this inconsistency is perfectly correlatedwith the incentive to raise money.

For example, most Funders have significantbusiness interests. And at least on big businessissues, surprise surprise, we don’t actually have aRight-wing and Left-wing party. We have twopolitical parties standing right in the middle. Boththe Republicans and the Democrats pushed for thederegulation of Wall Street. Both Republicans andDemocrats have allowed the oversight of OSHA towane. Both Republicans and Democrats havepermitted the most absurd examples of corporatewelfare to flourish — the Export-Import Bank, forexample, which subsidizes the financing of U.S.exports, or ethanol subsidies which survived untilthis year (defended vigorously by GroverNorquist!).33 Both Republicans and Democratshave voted overwhelmingly to extend the terms ofexisting copyrights — a policy so obviouslyagainst the public’s interest that the libertarianNobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman

said he would join a brief opposing it only if thewords “no brainer” were somewhere in the brief.And both Republicans and Democrats have unitedto defend U.S. sugar barons who to this day arestill protected by import tariffs. As the CatoInstitute wrote in 2012 about this policy:

The big losers from federal sugar programs areU.S. consumers. The Government AccountabilityOffice estimates that U.S. sugar policies costAmerican consumers about $1.9 billion annually. Atthe same time, sugar policies have allowed a smallgroup of sugar growers to become wealthy becausesupply restrictions have given them monopoly power.The GAO found that 42 percent of all sugar subsidiesgo to just 1 percent of sugar growers. To protect theirmonopolies, many sugar growers, such as the Fanjulfamily of Florida, have become influential campaignsupporters of many key members of Congress.34

Alignment on the money issues thus keeps bothparties in the fundraising game. Without alignment,one side would be blown out of the park.

But on social issues, the opinions of therelevant Funders are sharply divided, and the

parties naturally polarize to exploit that division.The Right defends “the sanctity of marriage”against (gay) people who want to commit toeverlasting love. The Left defends “the right tochoose” against many who see the fetus asdeserving of as much protection as “any otherperson.” Framing the issues in this polarized waymakes it easier for both sides to rally to engage.And the more who engage, the easier it is to raisemoney.

“But what about gerrymandering. Doesn’t thatincrease polarization?”

In an obvious sense, as the deans ofcongressional studies, Tom Mann and NormOrnstein, put it, “Redistricting does matter ... bysystematically shaping more safe districts for eachparty.”35 But safe districts also make it easier toraise money — since it’s easier to speak to theextremes when you don’t need to worry about themoderate middle, and safe seats are, by definition,seats without a moderate middle.

Polarization is thus a scourge on moderngovernment. It has produced a Congress, again in

the words of Mann and Ornstein, “more loyal toparty than to country.” And as a result, we have a“political system ... grievously hobbled at a timewhen the country faces unusually seriouschallenges and grave threats.”36

But here’s the punch line that too many miss:This scourge is a symptom, not the disease. Thedisease is the corruption of campaign finance. AsMann and Ornstein rightly put it, that corruptionworks “in multiple ways to reinforce the partisanpolarization at the root of dysfunctionalpolitics.”37

And this produces this obvious — and what toevery citizen should be terrifying — corollary:

What’s bad for America might well be goodfor funding campaigns.

For there are plenty of interests keen to blockchange. And the more dysfunctional our systembecomes, the easier it is for congresspeople andlobbyists to effectively sell the guarantee of nochange.

Most of the time this happens without anyone

explicitly describing it. Or naming it. The playersknow it perfectly well. The less they talk about it,the better it is for everyone.

But sometimes the truth slips, and Lee Fang atthe Nation uncovered a wonderful example of justsuch a slipping truth. The website for the lobbyingfirm Endgame Strategies promoted its services byexplicitly pointing to their ability to leverage theSenate’s dysfunction:

Managing Holds and Filibusters. Yourorganization has an interest in a bill that has provencontroversial and you require advocacy before thoselegislators — often backbench Senate Republicans— who may exercise their prerogatives to delay orobstruct. Endgame Strategies will give you new waysto manage your interests in a legislative environmentthat gives great power to individual senators.38

Dysfunction is profitable, for those who sell it(lobbyists). It becomes a necessity for those whodepend upon the help and favor of those who sell it(Congress). Thus there should be no surprise thatwe have entered a stage in our government’sdecline in which — except for the random reform-

driving-catastrophe — we get no serious orsensible reform on either the Left or the Right.

In 1846, in his book On Walden , Henry DavidThoreau wrote this:

There are a thousand hacking at the branches ofevil to one who is striking at the root.

We as a people need to recognize this root. Weneed to see it, and name it, and organize to changeit. We all — those of us motivated to engagepolitically, those of us angry at what ourgovernment is or is not doing — have our issue.We all have the cause that we are, in some form,fighting for.

But we must all come to see that regardless ofthe issue, whether on the Right or the Left, reformwill get blocked by this one root: this corruption,this dependence upon the Lesters, this dependenceupon an influence that conflicts with a dependence“upon the People alone.”

“Corruption” is thus the root that all of us muststrike at, if we’re ever to achieve any progressagainst the many “branches of evil.” And ending

this corruption would be the change that wouldmake other change possible.

Known and ignored

So far, we all know this. Everything I’ve writtenso far is just a reminder. A trigger to get you torecollect what you have already recognized amillion times over. It is the most obvious banalityof U.S. political life to observe that the UnitedStates government is corrupt. Not in the GildedAge sense of corruption, but in a uniquelyAmerican sense (that American lobbyists are nowfrantically working to spread to other democraciesacross the globe39):

Our Congress is corrupt.It is obvious.Yet we ignore the obvious.We ignore it the way we ignore death. Or

taxes. Or the end of the world. We ignore itbecause changing it just seems impossible. Thevery idea of motivating a political movement torise up and make this system different seemsbeyond the power of any of us. So we turn insteadto the problems that seem possible — likeeradicating polio from the face of the globe (Bill

Gates), or building a database of images of everystreet across the globe (Google), or developing atruly universal translator of the sort Captain Kirkused to speak to the Klingons and that we coulduse to speak to the French or Malagasy(Microsoft), or making a fusion reactor in a garage(as Taylor Wilson did at the age of 1440). Theseare the manageable problems. They are thepossible problems. And so we engage them, andignore the impossible.

But here’s what we must see:We cannot ignore this corruption anymore. We

need a government that works.Not works for the Left or works for the Right.

But works for the citizens of the Left and Right,who bind together to win elections, and then get tosee their own brand of reform enacted.

We don’t have that government now. Thesystem we have now guarantees that sensiblereform from either side will be blocked. Sowhether it is tax simplification or climate changelegislation, smaller government or cheaper healthcare, financial reform or ending “crony capitalism”

— this corruption gives opponents the tools todefeat a democratic majority, and to steer thegovernment away from sensible reform.

So grab the issue you care most about, sit itdown in front of you, look it straight in the eyesand explain to it that there will be no Christmasuntil we fix this corruption. That on practicallynone of the most important issues facing thiscountry will we make any progress toward anysensible reform until this corruption ends.

My point is not that my issue — this corruption— is the most important issue facing this nationtoday. It isn’t. Your issue is. The issue you careabout is. Whether it’s climate change oroverregulation, financial reform or health care, acomplex and invasive tax system or inequality, thedebt or education — whatever. You pick the issue.Let that issue be the most important issue that weas a people face.

My issue isn’t that most important issue. Myissue is just the first issue: The issue we mustsolve before we can address these other mostimportant issues. Before we have any sensible

reform of any one of them.For we, as a people, cannot afford a future

without sensible reform. As Mann and Ornstein putit:

All of the boastful talk of Americanexceptionalism cannot obscure the growing sense thatthe country is squandering its economic future andputting itself at risk because of an inability to governeffectively.41

The United States is not the world. And ourcompetitors in the world are not all afflicted withthe pathologies of our government. Countriesacross the planet are able to adopt sensible energypolicy, or sensible patent policy, or sensibleInternet policy, or sensible health care policy.Those countries therefore do not face the burdensthat our economy does — as we pay dearly for ahealth care system that delivers second-rate healthcare to too many, as we destroy the promise of themiddle class by neglecting public schools, as wechoke the entrepreneurial utopia that our countrywas by selling her future to crony capitalists. It issimply no longer true to say of the United States

that we give those who work the hardest thegreatest opportunity to advance. We don’t. HoratioAlger has moved to Europe.42 And he won’t comehome again until we restore a government thatworks.

Fixes

So what do we do? How could we end thiscorruption, and make it possible for We the Peopleto move on to the issues that we must finallyaddress sensibly?

The analytics here are not hard.If the problem is a system that forces

candidates for Congress to (a) spend too much time raising money

from (b) too small a slice of America (aka,

“the Funders”),then the solution to this problem is a system

that (a) demands less time raising money,

and from (b) a wider slice of America (aka, “the

People”).A solution, in other words, that spreads out the

Funders’ influence. That keeps a Congressresponsive to its Funders, but that makes “theFunders” “the People.”

This way of understanding the problem is verydifferent from the way many other reformers talkabout the problem. For I focus upon the effects ofcampaign fundraising on candidates, not upon theeffects of campaign spending on the people.

Others see the problem differently. They say,for instance, that the problem is we have “too muchmoney in politics,” and that therefore we need to“get money out of politics.”

I understand this sentiment. I don’t understandthe analysis. Campaigns cost money, and willalways cost money. Yet despite the amount thatgets spent on campaigns, we still don’t have anoverly informed public. We don’t even have asufficiently informed public. And if instead offundraising from the Lesters, candidates got themoney to run their campaigns from the People, itwouldn’t be a bad thing if campaigns spent twiceas much as they currently do (which would bringcampaign spending for an election cycle up to theamount that Procter & Gamble and Verizon spendtogether each year43).

Again: It’s not the people who are corrupted

by political speech. It’s the system that iscorrupted by the way we fund campaigns.

The same principle applies regarding the viewthat “money is not speech.” That slogan was bornin response to the Supreme Court’s decision inBuckley v. Valeo (1976). In that case, the Courtupheld limitations on contributions to campaigns,but struck down limitations on “independentexpenditures.” The Court did so because it viewedspending money to influence political campaignsas constitutionally protected “free speech.” If itwere not constitutionally protected, the reformersreason, then Congress would be free to limit“independent expenditures” and thereby limit, intheir view, political corruption.

That’s true. If it were the case that “money isnot speech,” Congress would be free to limit“independent expenditures.” But there would beother consequences too: Congress would also befree to ban any money being spent to influenceelections at all, or at least limit it severely —thereby effectively protecting incumbents fromtheir challengers. And depending upon how the

Supreme Court sways, Congress might even befree to limit spending to criticize the government,or particular policies of the government, sinceonce again, if money is not speech, then spendingmoney, like any other action, could possibly beregulated.44

If I thought the only way to end the corruptionof our government was to risk this type ofcensorship, I’d think long and hard about whetherto risk it.

But I don’t think this is the only way to end thiscorruption. I believe instead that we can change theway candidates fund their campaigns withoutchanging Buckley v. Valeo in particular, or the waythe First Amendment protects free speechgenerally.

For again, the problem is not the speech. Theproblem is the fundraising.

The same problem arises with the view heldby some that we could solve this problem ofcorruption if only “corporations were not‘persons’ ” and if, therefore, they were deniedconstitutional rights. That they are “persons” has

been the view of a majority on the Supreme Courtfor some time. Why they are deemed “persons” hasbeen a puzzle for the rest of us for that same “sometime.”45

Yet this view — that corporations beingpersons is the problem — too is mistaken: For theproblem as I’ve described it has nothing to dowith whether corporations are persons. Even ifthey weren’t, the Funders would still be fundingcampaigns. And even with corporations as“persons,” we can still change the system so thatthe Funders are not corrupting elections.

That’s not to say that I agree with the sillydecisions of the Supreme Court restricting theability of government to regulate in important areasof health and welfare, all in the name of “freespeech.” (On this reasoning, for example, thecourts have struck down a Massachusettslaw regulating tobacco companies’ marketing tokids, and a Vermont law that required foodcompanies to label genetically modified food.) Idon’t. I think the Supreme Court is wrong in thosecases. And we need to work — especially law

professors need to work — to explain to the Courtjust why.

But we citizens need to recognize that theproblem with America’s democracy is not justsome recent Supreme Court decisions. Theproblem with America’s democracy is America’sdemocracy. The problem is the Skinner box thatcandidates for Congress must live within just toraise the money they need to run their campaigns.That Skinner box is the corruption. And whateverthe virtues in declaring that corporations are notpersons, that declaration will not liberate Congressfrom the box.

Or, finally, some believe that any problemwith the current system would be solved simply bymore transparency. That somehow, if we could seewho gave what more clearly than we already do,we would be less concerned with how the “who”was inspired to give the “what.”

This too is just wrong — not because we don’tneed transparency in the system. We do. Weobviously do.46 But transparency alone won’tsolve the corruption of this system, and in the short

term, it may well make the problems of trustworse.47

My friend David Donnelly, who has beenfighting this fight as long as anyone, makes thepoint beautifully with a perfectly tuned metaphor:When the Deepwater Horizon undersea oil wellexploded and started pouring millions of gallons ofoil into the Gulf of Mexico, it was certainly a goodthing that we got to see the spewing oil becausesomeone had installed an underwater webcam toview it. But it would be a pretty fundamentalconfusion to believe that the problem of theDeepwater Horizon would be solved if only wehad a better, clearer, maybe HD webcam. Seeingthe sludge was good. But to fix the problem meansstopping the sludge, not seeing it more clearly.

So too with the corruption of campaignfinance. No doubt we need to see who gavewhat.48 But we don’t inspire people to be engagedin government, or in elections, simply by showingever more clearly the corrupt influence that exists.As John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morseput it, “We should not look to new ways of

exposing people to every nook and cranny of thedecision-making process as a solution to people’snegative views of government.”49 We should lookinstead to changing the very good reasons peoplehave for this negative view of government.Transparency of course. But not transparencyalone.

So again, the analytics are easy: We solve thiscorruption not by “getting money out of politics,”not by declaring that “money is not speech,” not bypursuing the “red herring,” as Garrett Eppsdescribes it,50 by declaring that “corporations arenot persons,” and not just by making everytransaction in politics perfectly transparent. Wesolve this problem by embracing “citizen-fundedelections.” By adopting a system, in other words,that:

(a) demands less candidate time raising money,and enables candidates to raise that money from

(b) a wider slice of America.

Such a system of “citizen-funded elections”would not require a constitutional amendment, or

at least not at first. Even this Supreme Court hasclearly affirmed the power of Congress tocomplement the system for funding elections in away that would effectively spread the influence ofthe funders to the people generally. And there areseveral powerful proposals floating about todaythat would achieve this effect perfectly well.

In 2010, for example, the House ofRepresentatives came close to passing the FairElections Now Act, which would give candidatesa chance to fund their campaigns with small-dollarcontributions only. After qualifying through a largenumber of small donations, candidates wouldreceive a large lump sum to fund their campaigns,and small contributions ($100 or less) receivedafter qualifying would be matched by thegovernment 5 to 1.51

Likewise, the American Anti-CorruptionAct, certainly the most comprehensive reformproposal advanced in a century, and supported bythe reform group Represent.US, would give everyvoter a $100 voucher, which citizens could thengive to candidates who agree to fund their

campaign with small-dollar contributions only.52

Or again, an idea that I’ve advanced called theGrant and Franklin Project would have a smallervoucher ($50), funded by rebating the first $50every voter pays in taxes (and despite what youmight have read, every voter certainly sends atleast $50 to the federal treasury). Candidates couldreceive those vouchers if they agree to fund theircampaign with vouchers only, plus contributionscapped at $100 per citizen.

Or, finally, Congressman John Sarbanes, afourth-term Democrat from Maryland and certainlyamong the most important of Congress’s reformers,has proposed the Grassroots DemocracyAct, which creates matching grants, tax credits, anda pilot program for vouchers, all to the end ofmaking it feasible for candidates to fund theircampaigns with small-dollar contributions only.53

Each of these proposals would make itpossible for candidates to step out of the Skinnerbox and return to the task of governing. Because allof them would spread the funder influence from the

Lesters to the People and change the dynamic ofdependence. Each of them has been tried in someform in the states. Each of them could be tinkeredwith to give candidates an opportunity to runwinning elections without ever having to becomedependent upon the Lesters, and without everhaving to act in a way that draws their integrityinto doubt.

Indeed, for me, insanely and overly sensitiveas I am, this is among the most important issuesthat any member of Congress needs to recognize.As one former member explained his decision toleave Congress:

People just presume we are dishonorable. ...Imagine living under a cloud of suspicion all the time.If you can do that, you can understand why some of usthink serving in Congress isn’t enjoyable.54

For this is among the greatest sins of thecurrent system. No matter what a member ofCongress does, there is always the plausibleargument that she did it because of the money.Even if the action is at the core of her beliefs, we

as a people believe she did it because of themoney. The system that Congress has allowed toevolve doesn’t allow us to trust Congress. So wedon’t — which is why America’s confidence inCongress hovers at below 15 percent.55

But if we change that system by givingCongress members the chance to embrace analternative of small-dollar funding, then we givethem the chance to earn our trust again. Citizen-funded elections would make it (almost)impossible to believe that any Congress didwhatever it did “because of the money.” Instead,citizen-funded elections would make it possiblefor all of us to believe — as we desperately wantto believe — that whenever Congress didsomething silly, it was either because there weretoo many Democrats, or because there were toomany Republicans, but not because of the money.

“But what about the SuperPACs? Even if wehad ‘citizen-funded elections,’ won’t SuperPACscontinue to dominate the system? And won’t theLesters simply turn to them to find a way to exerttheir influence?”

There’s no doubt that Citizens Unitedunleashed a series of decisions by courts and theFederal Election Commission (FEC) that havecreated a new, and even more virulent instance ofprecisely the corruption I’ve described.56 BeforeCitizens United, Members were dependent uponthe Funders to fund their campaigns. After CitizensUnited, members of Congress are dependent uponthe Funders to fund their SuperPACs too. Nottechnically “their” SuperPACs, of course, becausethe whole idea of SuperPACs is that they are“independent” of the candidates (and if youbelieve that, then ...). But whether they have “theirSuperPAC” or not, candidates for Congress mustnow inspire the Lesters to contribute to theircampaign, and to these independent groups too.

The incentives here are truly invidious. Asformer Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) once describedit to a television reporter, every incumbent in D.C.is now terrified that 30 days before an election,some SuperPAC will drop $1 million in adsagainst him or her. That fear inspires a logicalresponse: Incumbents seek to secure a kind of

SuperPAC insurance — a guarantee that if they areattacked, an equal but opposite response will belaunched. But because the incumbents can’t simplyturn to their own largest contributors (bydefinition, these contributors have maxed out), theincumbents must secure that insurance by finding aSuperPAC on their side, which has a strong enoughreason to intervene to support that incumbent. Andall this security has to be in place long before thereis an attack. So the incumbent needs to cement theloyalty of this potentially friendly SuperPAC, injust the way SuperPACs like — by votingaccording to the views supported by the Funders ofthe SuperPAC.57

This is the economics of a protection racket.Long before even a single dollar is spent, the verythreat that dollars will be spent has changed thebehavior of the government in power. And in thisobvious dynamic, the dependence of Congressupon the Funders has been radically increased.

So of course I agree that Citizens United is areal problem. And it may well be that we need toamend the Constitution to deal with that real

problem. But (1) even if we do, that doesn’tchange the strategy that we should be followingright now. And (2) in any case, I’m not yetconvinced that we will in fact have to amend theConstitution to deal with Citizens United.

(1) The need to amend the Constitutioneventually doesn’t change the strategy now,because the only way we will ever have thepolitical support in Congress to defend an electionsystem of integrity is if we have a Congresschosen through an election system of integrity.We need, in other words, to change the wayCongress’s elections are funded, if we’re to haveany chance of achieving the supermajority supportthat we’d need to change the way the Constitutionhas been interpreted. The first step to changing theConstitution is to change Congress.

But more important, (2) it’s not even clear thatwe need to change the Constitution to deal withCitizens United.

First, citizen funding may be enough. As thenonprofit Dēmos puts it,

If candidates for federal office were mostly

raising money in small contributions from averagecitizens, and if outside spending groups wereorganizing these average citizens to give them a loudervoice in the political process, the sheer volume ofmoney raised and spent might not present such atroubling problem.58

Even with SuperPACs, this tactic may givemembers of Congress enough independence to dothe right (according to their constituents’ view)thing. And that would mean we could ignore thisignoble decision, and get on with the project ofdoing government well.

Second, even if citizen funding is not enough,for complicated law-geek reasons that I’veexplained elsewhere,59 it’s not even clear thatCitizens United denies Congress the power toaddress the most virulent problem that hasdeveloped since it was decided — SuperPACs.It’s my view that if presented in the right way, theSupreme Court would conclude that SuperPACscan be regulated, because SuperPACs arecorruption incarnate (in the sense that I havedescribed in this book).

But even if I’m wrong about that, here is thecritical point:

It would be an incredible waste of a reformmovement to focus its energy upon reversing aSupreme Court opinion — especially an opinionthat didn’t even cause the problem.

Citizens United was a close vote. Anincredibly close vote. At least two of the justicesin that majority are not going to hang on to theirseats for much longer. When they step down, atleast if they’re replaced by more moderatejustices, it is difficult to believe that the extremismof that opinion will survive. So why build amovement to give us what time will give usanyway?

Especially because if this is what we fight for,and this is what we get — reversing CitizensUnited — we will not have begun to get what weneed to solve the corruption of this system.

For remember: On January 20, 2010, the dayb e fo r e Citizens United was decided, ourdemocracy was already broken. The corruption Ihave described was already flourishing. We have

lived in Lesterland for at least 18 years. CitizensUnited didn’t take us there. And if all we achievedthrough this movement of reform is a return to theworld that existed on January 20, 2010, we willhave achieved nothing.

We need a movement that speaks truth, nottrendiness. A movement that teaches America whatthe problem actually is, and how that problem canbe fully fixed. And the analytics in that lessonshould be clear: We fix this corruption only byfreeing candidates from the Skinner box ofcampaign funding.

Farm leagues

The analytics are easy.It’s the politics that is hard.And hard, maybe impossibly hard, all because

of a street — K Street, the name we use to refer tothe industry of lobbying that now thrives within thebeltway of D.C.

“Capitol Hill,” in the words of CongressmanJim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee who firstwent to Congress 30 years ago, “has become afarm league for K Street.”

Members, staffers, and bureaucrats have anincreasingly common business model — a modelfocused upon their life after government. Their lifeas lobbyists. Fifty percent of the Senate between1998 and 2004 left to become lobbyists. Forty-twopercent of the House. And as United Republiccalculated in 2012, the average salary increase forthe 12 Congress members they studied was 1,452percent.60

For former Senators and Congress members,the road to K Street, a mere two blocks from

the White House, is paved with money.Image: AgnosticPreachersKid/Creative

CommonsSuch wealth is very different from the way

things used to be. Lyndon Johnson was constantlyfearful of what life after government would bring.As Robert Caro describes it, “Over and over againhe related how once, while he was riding in anelevator in the Capitol, the elevator operator hadtold him that he had been a congressman.”61 But ina world of hundred-percent, maybe thousand-

percent pay increases, there will be very fewformer congresspeople running elevators.Lobbying for elevator companies perhaps. Butrunning elevators — or any other non-influence-peddling work — no way.

Yet if the reform that I am describing wereadopted, then K Street would shrink. Dramatically.

It wouldn’t disappear. It shouldn’t disappear— lobbyists are essential in any moderndemocracy. But the lobbyists who would survivewould be the policy wonks: those expert inadvising about the complex issues that regulationinevitably involves. They wouldn’t be the powerbrokers, or the channels through which campaigncash gets directed. They wouldn’t be as valuableto their clients as the lobbyists of today are. Andthus they wouldn’t be as rich. The economy oflobbying in a reformed D.C. would be radicallyless lucrative. And so it could no longer afford togive Congress members and staffers andbureaucrats the huge pay increases the currenteconomy does.

So for Congress to adopt the changes that Ihave described would be for Congress to kill themost lucrative public service retirement packagethat our Nation has known.

How then is it possible, one might fairly ask,to imagine them changing this?

I get the skepticism. Or pessimism. Or, forsome, hopelessness. Taking on this power is noteasy. Beating it will be incredibly hard. So Iunderstand the impatience that so often greets theargument for reform: Why talk about a change that

just can’t happen? Why waste time dreaming for amiracle?

I get it. But I don’t buy it.This problem is solvable. Indeed, if you think

back to the problems our parents took on — racismin the 1960s, sexism in the 1970s, and then for ustoday, homophobia — the problem of corruptionseems eminently solvable. Those problems werehard problems. You don’t just wake up one day nolonger a racist. Or a sexist. It takes generations ofhard work to rip that ugliness from our socialDNA.

But the problem I’m talking about is just aproblem of incentives. And if we changed thoseincentives, the corrupting behavior that theyproduce would change as well. When Connecticutadopted a small-dollar funding system for itsrepresentatives and governor, 78 percent of theelected representatives — Democrat andRepublican alike — opted into the system in itsfirst year.62 And that’s because, unlike in the caseof racism or sexism, politicians don’t have a deepdesire to continue the humiliating existence of life

in a Skinner box. And if only we gave them aconvincing way to do it differently, they wouldtake it. Of course, once they understand theconsequences of this different system — for theirfuture, if indeed they see a future on K Street —they might not be eager to see the change enacted.But if we could build a political force powerfulenough to force its enactment, the change wouldstick. A new economy would develop — one lesslucrative for lobbyists no doubt, but one moreclosely dependent “on the people alone.”

The challenge is therefore to build thatpolitical force — something we, as a people, havenot done since the Progressive Era, when bothRepublicans and Democrats alike demanded thatthe corruption of that age end.

And just as they achieved their victory then, sotoo could we: For though we might live inLesterland, even in Lesterland “the people have theultimate influence over their elected officials.”

We still have the power to throw them out,which is what we should do to any politician,whether a Democrat, a Republican, or an

Independent, who does not commit to fundamentalreform.

The Lesters may not like it. But they’ve beensloppy. They have left us a way out. And it’s timewe used it.

How

In July, 2012, on the cusp of a full-scalepresidential campaign, Gallup ran theirquadrennial poll asking Americans to rank the toppriorities for the next president. Number twoon that list — second only to “creating good jobs”— was “reducing corruption in the federalgovernment.”63 Eighty-seven percent of Americansaffirmed this as an “extremely” or “veryimportant” goal — beating reducing the deficit,dealing with terrorism, overcoming gridlock, anddealing with global warming.

By “corruption,” however, Americans werenot thinking of William Jefferson or Tom DeLay.There hadn’t been a significant federal politicalscandal in almost half a decade. Instead, the onlycorruption-related issue that was anywhere in thepopular press in July 2012, was the endlessattention the press was giving to the almost endlessstream of big money into political campaigns.Americans were being shown again and again thatthe Funders were in charge. And the more they saw

this, the more they became committed to the ideathat this corruption had to end.

Yet if you had turned to the websites of eitherthe Obama or Romney campaigns in July 2012 (or,for that matter, at any time during the electioncycle), you would have found diddly-squat about“corruption.” Absolutely no reference whatsoeverto this issue, or its importance. Not even a hint of apolicy offered by either presidential candidateabout how they were going to address this, thesecond most pressing issue on the United States’top 10 list. Indeed, according to a researcher Iasked to look at the question, this was the firsttime, as far as we could see, that an issue at the topof Gallup’s list was not even mentioned by eithermajor presidential candidate.64

It’s not hard to understand why neithercandidate even mentioned this issue. Evenpoliticians get hypocrisy. Unless the candidatecould credibly claim that he would change thesystem, there was no reason to remind people thathe too was part of this corrupt system. BarackObama had done a pretty good job in 2008 arguing

that corruption was indeed the issue we had toaddress if we were going to address any otherissue (Obama: “if we’re not willing to take up thatfight, then real change — change that will make alasting difference in the lives of ordinaryAmericans — will keep getting blocked by thedefenders of the status quo”65), but after four yearsof Obama doing literally nothing to “take up thatfight,” no one was going to buy his raising thatissue again.

This unity among us about the importance ofthis issue is the basis for hope that we mightactually prevail in this fight. Corruption wasnowhere on the top 10 list in 2000, or 2004. Itmade its first appearance in 2008, when it hitnumber four on the Gallup poll.66 That it appearedthen is not surprising, as Obama had madecorruption an issue during the primary and McCainhad been railing against it since 2000.

But though the politicians forgot about theissue in 2012, we did not. Its salience has onlygrown among us, even if the willingness of our“leaders” to “take up that fight” is as shriveled as

an overripe prune.The sole reason this issue has survived is the

incredible hard work done by a movement I’vewatched from the sidelines with admiration butwith skepticism.

Born of the embarrassment called CitizensUnited, this movement has brought togetherliterally millions of Americans behind the idea thatCitizens United must be reversed. We didn’t takemuch convincing: As the WashingtonPost reported soon after the case was decided, 80percent of Americans polled opposed the decision— higher among Democrats (85 percent), but stillhigh for Republicans (76 percent) and higher stillfor Independents (81 percent).67

But polls don’t build movements. People do.And the thousands of Americans working throughboth new organizations (such asMoveToAmend.org andFreeSpeechForPeople.org) and long-establishedorganizations (Common Cause, People for theAmerican Way, Public Citizen, and U.S. PIRG,

among many, many others68) achieved incrediblesuccess by getting millions to rally around what thepolls had reported: that We, the People, wanted achange.

In July 2012, just as Gallup was reporting that“corruption” was our number two concern, a broadcoalition of these reform groups delivered to theUnited States Senate almost 2 million signaturesdemanding an amendment to overturn the SupremeCourt’s mistake. And as the coalition’swebsite, United4thePeople.org, documents, thatmovement has now succeeded in getting 11 statesand hundreds of towns and cities to passresolutions demanding a constitutional amendmentto overturn this decision.69

What’s critically important about thismovement is that it is led by outsiders. No doubtthere are some prominent politicians (BernieSanders, Jamie Raskin) and former politicians(Russ Feingold) within it, but the real heroes arethe people who are never going to run for anything,and who want nothing more from this governmentthan to have it work. People like David Cobb, John

Bonifaz, Zephyr Teachout, Jeff Clements — thesecitizens have spend literally thousands of hourstraipsing across the country, speaking to RotaryClubs or in living rooms, to 10, or 50, or a hundredpeople at a time, convincing fellow citizens to joinin the most difficult political struggle that ourpolitical system envisions — amending theConstitution.

Their success in turn points to the mostimportant fact about U.S. politics today. If youlistened to the chatterati, you’d think the onlyinteresting division in American politics isbetween the right side and the left side. Betweenthe GOP and the Dems. Between Fox and MSNBC.

But the interesting division in Americanpolitics today is not between the left side and theright side, but between the inside and the outside.The inside, which is the politics of D.C., of lifewithin the Beltway; and the outside, which is thepolitics of the rest of the country, and the life of therest of the country.

When you listen to what the inside talks about,or cares about, or deliberates (or, more accurately,feigns deliberating) about, and contrast it to whatthe outside talks about, or cares about, ordeliberates about, you might be reminded of thetitle of the book by John Gray, at least with a slightremix:

D.C. Is from Mars, We Are from Earth.

We care about “corruption”; they can’t evenspell the word. We want a government of integrity.They sell sponsorships of political conventions tocorporations for millions. We want a governmentthat works. They realize that the easiest way forthem to fundraise to stay in power is for gridlockto become a marketable product.

They are from Mars, we are from Earth, and itis time we organize to defeat these Martians.(Where is Orson Wells when you need him?)

This is not the first time that outsiders havedone this. Just over a century ago, and after morethan 30 years of organizing, the Progressives in theUnited States finally achieved supermajoritysupport for the idea that politics in the U.S. wascorrupted, and that corrupted politics had tochange. No doubt, we’ve seen critical socialmovements since the Progressives that havefocused upon much more important substantiveissues — the civil rights movement, the equalrights movement, and now the gay rightsmovement. But those movements fought bigotry,and bigots have a very different power from the

power of the Lesters. The civil and equal rightsmovements had to change social norms, on the wayto changing the law. But the Progressive movementhad to take on power directly. And amazingly, ifimperfectly, after a generation’s fight, theysucceeded.

Today, we have to rebuild that movement. Wehave been given the essential tools — the Net, andthe capacity it has for facilitating true grass-rootsorganizing. Yet I fear that today we have forgottenthe most important feature of that importantmovement.

We think of “progressives” today as liberals.But they were not. The Progressive movementincluded both Republicans (remember, TeddyRoosevelt was elected as a Republican) andDemocrats. And the key to their success was thatthey fought as progressives for issues that unitedthe U.S., not issues that divided it. Their target wasa broken democracy, and the whole country (savethe Anarchists) was united in the view that itneeded to fix its democracy by further protecting itfrom the “corruption” of “special interests.”

The lessons that investigative journalists andmuckraking novelists had taught the U.S. was thatits governments had been deeply corrupt. And whatunited the wide range of political perspectives thatcalled themselves “progressive” — fromRepublican Progressives like Robert M. LaFollette and Teddy Roosevelt to DemocraticProgressives like Woodrow Wilson — was theidea that fixing this broken democracy was themost effective way to taking on that corruption.

The Progressives achieved this unity notthrough a single national progressive organization.There was not a “United Progressives forAmerica,” or “Progressives United” in 1912.Instead, the progressive movement wasfundamentally decentralized: There were hundredsof progressive groups organized around dozens ofissues, but all in some way acknowledging thecentral importance of corruption reform. Therewere Progressives fighting to give women the vote,fighting to force America dry, fighting to establishthe right of labor to organize, fighting to end childlabor, and fighting to enact monopoly regulation.

But each of those groups was also fighting for thefundamental principle that Robert La Follette hadannounced when he launched the NationalProgressive Republican League: that better, ormore direct democracy would “reduc[e] the powerof special interests, eliminat[e] corruption, andelevat[e] the quality of American government.”70

The NPRL platform called for the direct electionof senators; the adoption of initiative, referendum,and recall processes in every state; the directprimary for federal elections, including thepresidential election; and a corrupt-practices actthat would require candidates to disclose theirsources of financial support.71 And by embracingthese procedural reforms, “the leaders of theNPRL were granting their fellow progressivespermission to be diverse.”72

I’m not sure why the Progressives organized asthey did. I’m not sure whether it was a strategicchoice or a practical necessity. There was noInternet in 1905. Neither was there a universaltelephone system. Or radio. Or direct mail

marketing. In a world without broadcasttechnologies, there was no temptation to build theBorg to fight the Borg. Political organizing had tobe peer to peer, by necessity. And as progressivessaw the diversity develop, it no doubt becameobvious to them too that they needed to feed andnourish this movement of diversity by respectingand encouraging its diversity.

But whatever the reason, the reality wasgenius. Because no fundamental change hashappened here except when the country was unitedbehind it. (Except, of course, the Civil War, but itscost in blood and treasure is not an argument forthe other side.) Every fundamental change hashappened when the proponents have found a wayto unite the country across political divisions. Andthat act of unification has only ever happened whenthe proponents of change have found a way tospeak so that every American has had a reason tolisten.

By saying this, I am not saying there haven’tbeen important partisan victories in Americanhistory too. Of course there have been. And I’m not

saying I’m not interested in partisan victories. Ofcourse I am. Partisanship is important and vital andsometimes even fun(ny). But tectonic shifts don’thappen in Democratic or Republican drag. Theyhappen when Americans think as Americans. Whencitizens think as citizens. When we all find a wayto step above the partisan divide that feedsordinary politics, and summon to life amongourselves a kind of citizen politics.

So the Progressives (circa 1912), the move toaffirm the power of the federal government in themidst of economic crisis (circa 1937) (maybe), thecivil rights movement (circa 1965), the equalrights movement (circa 1978) — these were allfundamentally a-partisan movements, at least whenthey achieved their ultimate success. They wereeach, in other words, instances in which “We, thePeople” found a way to speak without using ourordinary spokespersons — ordinary politiciansalone. These were outsider political movements,which matured and had their effect once the“common wisdom” they taught moved to the inside.

Of all of these movements, the one that is most

instructive for us now is the civil rights movement.The Civil War gave birth to the civil rights

movement. Immediately after the war, the radicalRepublicans gave it its legal form — through the13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and through thecivil rights statutes that tried to summon into beinga nation committed to equality.

But very quickly, that dream was quashed by aconcerted, practically terroristic resistancethroughout the South, and by an exhausted,somewhat complicit resignation by politiciansthroughout the North. Slaves who had been freedand who had glimpsed a life of political, civil, andmaybe even social equality, quickly saw thatdream extinguished. And the fight for civil rightsfell into a deep if restless sleep for almost acentury.

The Supreme Court then kicked that movementawake again by its decision in 1954 to reverse itsdecision (from 1896) and to hold, finally, andunanimously, that racial segregation wasunconstitutional. And as blacks and whites beganto organize to deliver political victories on top of

this judicial victory, strategists for the movementhad to think through how best to motivate theAmerican people to demand change.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X greeteach other briefly while attending the Senatedebate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the

only time the pair ever met.Image: Marion S. Trikosko/U.S. News &

World Report/Public domainThere were at least two distinctive schools of

thought about how to inspire this activism. Therewas the one we associate today with Malcolm X,though it certainly predates Malcolm X. The wayto get people into the streets — this view held —was to make them angry. Violently angry. And theway to make them angry was to remind African-Americans about the betrayals of America since itsbirth. Anger, and hatred, and separation were theeffective means for turning people into the streets,so this view held. And if violence followed, thenso be it. For the black oppression of 300 years wasalready 300 years of violence.

But it is Martin Luther King Jr. whom we nowassociate with a very different view. “Fiery,demagogic oratory ... urging Negroes to armthemselves,”73 as King put it, would “reap nothingbut grief.” It may succeed in bringing a smallminority to the streets, but no fundamental reformwas going to happen with just 10 percent ofAmericans. Instead, what the movement neededwas a way to speak so the other side could hear.

In particular, a way that Northern whites couldhear. And the messages of violence meetingviolence, or hatred-induced separation, were notmessages that the other side would hear. “We can’tsolve this problem through retaliatory violence,”King taught.74 Riots would only inspire furtheroppression, and justified repression (in the eyes ofmost 1960s whites), since repression is the properway to respond to violence.

So rather than violence, the movement thatKing led embraced a message “the white people ...will be more willing to hear”75: nonviolence. Thiswas the better “strategy for achieving justice,”King told them.76 In the face of water cannon andattack dogs, civil rights protesters were to becomeGandhi. And this simple but profound image spokea message of justice that the other side could nothelp but hear.

We stand today at the same place that the civilrights movement did in 1957. The Supreme Courthas given our movement a gift. Not the same kindof gift that it gave African-Americans in Brown v.

Board of Education (and not to suggest thatupholding the 14th Amendment 86 years after itwas ratified was a “gift”), but a gift nonetheless,because Citizens United, like Brown, has inspireda political movement.

But the question we face now is how todevelop and articulate that movement. And as withthe civil rights movement in 1957, that questioninvites two very different answers.

On the one hand, we can articulate thismovement in a way that divides the United States— that frames this issue in a way that is certain toalienate.

On the other hand, we can articulate thismovement in a way that unites America — thatframes this issue in a way that can find commonground across the political spectrum.

So far, we have done the first. Though theinitial reaction to Citizens United was negativeacross the political spectrum, the politicalresponse has tilted strongly to the Left. This framesuggests that the problem with U.S. democracy isthe Citizens United decision, and that the way to

deal with Citizens United is to declare that“corporations are not persons,” or “money is notspeech.” The answer, in other words, is to build amovement against corporate America. Againstcapitalism. The answer is to speak to the 99percent, and hostage the 1 percent.

As someone from the Left, I get the attractionin this frame. The Supreme Court has developed atruly silly line of authority that is insulatingcorporations from the most obvious and sensibleregulation. That silliness has got to change.

But as someone who grew up on the Right, it isas obvious as snow that this way of framing theissue is only going to divide the country, not uniteit. For the salient fact about the U.S. is not “the 99percent vs. the 1 percent.” It is that 80 percent ofthe 99 percent believe that they are part of the 1percent — or should be so treated. It’s not richpeople who gave us the end to the “death tax.” It ismillions of ordinary people who could neverpossibly benefit from that gift to the ultra-rich. Asa child of the Right, I cannot believe that — dreamas liberals might — the United States is going to

rise up against the free market. We’re not going torally Kansas to what will be called “socialism.”More generally, we’re not going to win a fight thatdepends upon convincing the Right that their mostsacred views are just wrong.

Or at least, and more important, there’s noreason to have this fight if there’s another way toframe this issue that doesn’t force people to giveup what they (think they) care the most about.

Don’t get me wrong: If I believed that the onlyway to save this Republic was to convince myfellow Americans to give up on “capitalism,” I’dbe there. The only “-ism” I care about is (small“r”) republican-ism, as in the representativedemocracy our Framers meant to secure for us.

But you don’t need to be anti-capitalist to beanti-corruption. And indeed, as theorists such asLuigi Zingales, a libertarian economist from theUniversity of Chicago, have shown us, thecorruption I’ve described is a corruption of bothdemocracy and capitalism — a corruption thatpeople on the Left and the Right should all rallyagainst.

For by “the Funders” I don’t mean thecapitalists. The vast majority of capitalists havenever given a dime to any political campaign. And,as I’ve already said, I don’t mean the rich. Again,the vast majority of the rich have never given adime to any political campaign. I don’t even mean“big business.” The vast majority of “big business”enterprises wish only to be free to spend their timeworrying about business, not a bunch of lobbyists.

Instead, “the Funders,” (or at least the portionof the Funders that I’m attacking in this book) are asmall set of those with resources who would usetheir power to bend politics to protect themselves,or to give themselves special privilege. And asZingales (co-author of the wonderful book SavingCapitalism from the Capitalists) nicely remindsus, the most dangerous dynamic in capitalism is theone in which capitalists use their power overpolitics to protect themselves from the nextgeneration of capitalists. When they usegovernment to protect themselves fromcompetition.

It is this corruption — what people on the

Right call “crony capitalism” — that principledsouls on the Right can rally against. (Here’s PeterSchweizer: “Crony capitalism is good for those onthe inside. And it is lousy for everyone else. But itdoes provide a hybrid-powered vehicle to sustaina large base of rich campaign contributors withtaxpayer money.”77) And this is the samecorruption I have described throughout this book.Crony capitalism blocks reform from the Left. Itblocks reform from the Right. It protects oilcompanies from being forced to pay for theirpollution. It protects the invasive and extensiveregulation of business, so as to preserve a targetfor fundraising extortion.

We don’t need to attack “corporations” toattack this corruption. We need instead a strategythat allows all sides (or at least 80 percent of us)to recognize if not a common end, at least acommon enemy. We need allies against thiscorruption. We don’t need a single ideology überalles.

Now when people hear this kind of argument,they also hear something that I am not saying. What

they also hear is that we need a single, unifyingorganization that somehow purports to speak foreveryone.

But that’s not the strategy. Like theProgressives of a century ago, we need manyorganizations, each pushing the issues that eachcares about, from the political perspective thateach care about � but with a recognition of thecommon enemy that we all share. The strategy isnot to pretend that we all agree about everything.We don’t. There are real differences between theRight and the Left. But however fierce thedifferences, there should be no difference aboutthis issue: Just as FDR could stand with Stalin todefeat Hitler without the U.S. embracing theInternationale as the national anthem, so tooshould our Left and our Right (let’s not speculateabout which side gets to be FDR, and whichStalin) be able to stand together against thiscorruption without either side being forced to giveup on the other values that each holds dear.

Stand together, not become one. An alliance,not the Borg.

This ought to be easy. But as I’ve spent the lastfive years giving literally hundreds of talks aboutthe need for this movement of reform, and engagingwith people on all sides of this issue — fromOccupiers to Tea Partiers, from Rotary Clubs toJPMorgan — I’ve been struck by how hard it is. Inthe middle of a hyperpolarized political system,with political organizations that feed on hate andteach us to hate, with news media that profit themore they can get us to hate (“[i]n a fragmentedtelevision and radio world of intense competitionfor eyeballs and eardrums, sensationalism trumpssensible centrism”78), it should not be surprisingthat a cross-partisan alliance is not obvious toAmerican activists. But I am surprised still.

The clearest example of this resistance is astory I told in the first version of this book (OneWay Forward [Byliner, 2012]): At a teach-in atOccupy K Street, I implored the Occupiers toinvite Tea Partiers to sit down with them. “Youmay or may not like capitalism,” I told them, “butnobody likes ‘crony capitalism,’ and it is cronycapitalism that has corrupted this system of

government and given us the misregulation that ledto the collapse on Wall Street.”

Just after I said that, in a scene that could havebeen scripted in Hollywood, a man sitting in thefront row raised his hand and said, “I was one ofthe original Tea Partiers, and today I run a sitecalled AgainstCronyCapitalism.org. I canguarantee you that if you started talking about thecorruption from crony capitalism, you’d havethousands of Tea Partiers down here joining withyou in this fight.”

I thought the argument was obvious, and thatthe next steps would take care of themselves.

They didn’t.Instead, soon after my speech, a sportswriter

for the Nation, Dave Zirin, started tweeting aboutthe speech and then writing about it on his blog.We should not, he instructed, be collaborating withthe racists from the Tea Party. It was enough,apparently, for the movement to hang with its own.

But here’s the puzzle: Someone in theOccupiers’ “We can’t talk to the ‘racists’ of theTea Party” camp needs to explain to me how

Occupiers can speak for “the 99 percent,” once wesubtract the 10 to 30 percent who call themselvessupporters of the Tea Party or the 40 percent ofAmericans who call themselves conservatives.Zirin thinks these “numbers actually tell us verylittle about what ideas hold sway among the massof people in the United States.” But are the TeaPartiers, or the conservatives, just confused? Doesthe 99 percent slogan depend upon us believingthat one-third of the country is suffering frommassive false consciousness?

Zirin’s concern is important. It grows from adesire to build a “true movement,” as he put it.Such substantive movements are built aroundshared ideals and shared values. The ideals ofthose of us on the Left (“us”) are different from theideals of those people on the Right (“them”). Andif a true substantive movement has to give up talkabout its own different values or ideals, then itdies. We need to be able to defend universal healthcare, even if that isn’t something 99 percent agreeupon. We need to argue for a more progressive taxrate, even if most Americans don’t agree about just

how progressive that rate should be. We need toconstantly and vigorously remind the country aboutthe harms caused by racism and sexism andhomophobia; about the plight of immigrants,whether legal or not; about the hopelessness of thepoor in the U.S. — even if the vast majority ofAmericans wouldn’t put those concerns anywhereclose to the top. We on the Left need to have ourmovement, to build and rally our team for theinevitable fight over the substantive policies thatgovernment will enact — whether or not weachieve fundamental reform.

And so too on the Right. Tea Partiers andothers from the Right want a smaller government.They need to rally their troops against all sorts ofdo-gooders (like me) who have all sorts of newideas about how to spend tax dollars. They need tokeep their troops in line, and, perhaps moreimportant, they need to avoid alienating theirmembers by confusing them with talk that sounds,well, too liberal. Sure, there are Tea Partiers whowould pay attention enough to understand thesubtlety of a cross-partisan movement. But there

are also Tea Partiers — like Occupiers, and likepeople on the Left and Right more generally —who have two jobs, or three kids, or a hobby theylove, and who are just as likely to skim an emailabout “Reform” and get furious that someone NotFrom Their Tribe is mentioned approvingly.

But again, the movement, and the challenge,and the practice that I am describing are different.Our challenge is not to build a movement thatcoheres around a common set of substantivevalues. No one’s going to convince everyconservative to become a liberal, or every liberalto become a conservative.

Our challenge is to build an alliance that canagree about the need for a fundamental change inthe system itself. An alliance for constitutionalreform. An agreement not about which side shouldwin in a battle between Left and Right, but aboutthe rules that should govern that battle.

Such a movement needs first, as the 27-year-old Israeli activist turned member of parliament,Stav Shaffir, said about the Israeli “social justiceprotests,” a “first line of code”: a common plank

that each side can stand upon. Together.Our “first line of code” should be this:

corruption. A common recognition that the systemitself is broken. And a common understanding thatto fix this broken system will require not just avictory in Congress but constitutional — as infundamental — reform as well.

We did this at least once before. This is thestory not of the Declaration of Independence andthe war against Britain. It is the story of how thatnewly independent nation saved itself from almostcertain failure. The story, that is, of the framing ofour second Constitution (1787) and the rejection ofthe first (1781).

When people today think about that framing —if indeed they think about it at all — the image isnot a celebration of diversity. Seventy-four whitemen, all basically upper class, all basically elite.Sounds like a very boring party (or a facultymeeting of the Harvard Law School in 1952).

But in fact there was radical disagreementamong the framers of our Constitution. There weremen in that hall who believed that slavery was just,

and there were men in that hall who believed thatslavery was the moral abomination of the age. Yetthese men, with their radically different views,were able to put aside that disagreement longenough to frame a constitution that gave birth tothis Republic, because they realized that unlessthey did, the nation would fail.

There is no difference today between the TeaPartiers and the Occupiers — or between the Leftand Right in general — as profound or asimportant as that fight between the factions whofought about slavery. Nor is our challenge asprofound as the one that divided them. Theyneeded to craft a new nation. We need simply toend the corruption of an old and proud government.

If they could do what they did, we should beable to do this.

We are different, we Americans. We havedifferent values and different ideals. But take out adollar bill and read after me: E pluribus unum.Out of the many, one. And out of our many, weneed to find “one” in the sense of one commonunderstanding that could lead us on a path to save

this Republic.While we still can.

2do@now

So what is to be done now?This will take work. It will take more than

clicking a “Like” button or sending a video to yourfriends (though it will take that, too). It will takework that brings you out of your ordinary mix, thatgets you to speak or act or engage differently. Itwill take work. It will be difficult. And it won’thappen before the next commercial break.

But this is what we must do: We need to buildan outsiders’ movement that leverages the powerof the Net to take on the power of K Street. Notone group with one massive list, but many groupsand many lists, all pushing their own issues, whilealso pushing corruption too.

The aim of this outsiders’ movement must be tolay the groundwork for political entrepreneurs: forthe candidates who will finally take up this issue,credibly and believably, and make it a cause thatthe country can rally around.

But politicians will only raise this issue whenWe, the People, believe it in our soul, and speak

about it every time we utter anything that toucheson the political. And that means that there is workto do for all of us as citizens, peer to peer, and ascitizens within the different activist groups that weknow and support.

My aim in this chapter is thus to map the partsof this outsiders’ movement, to identify the rangeof things that must be done, to give anyone lookingfor a path a way forward. Not everything on thislist is appropriate for everyone. But it is necessarythat we see the full range that is needed, for thismovement will take many moving parts, eventuallyfinding a common rhythm on the way to defeating acommon enemy.As individuals

The first work is citizen work: to convincecitizens that this corruption is a root. To showthem, in other words, how the issues that they careabout are all affected by this core corruption. Andhow the issues that they care about could be moreeffectively addressed — if only this corruptioncould be removed.

To do this convincing requires work. The

peer-to-peer work of one citizen convincinganother. The truth here must become commonknowledge; the link must be uncontestedly obvious.And such truths are only ever spread by peopletalking to people. Thirty-second ads on TV don’tchange the way people think about an issue sofundamental. Three friends raising it, and talkingabout it, do.

But to find those three friends, we need torecruit an army. And if, for every “thousandhacking at the branches of evil,” there is but “onewho is striking at the root,” that means we need anarmy of about 300K, engaged in the project ofshowing everyone else this root, and “striking” it.

We need, in other words, an army ofrootstrikers: people of whatever background whobelieve it their mission to get others to see thisroot. (Jon Stewart was skeptical of that moniker,and recommended “batmen” instead. Obviously aman who doesn’t worry about clearing rights.)

Rootstriking is thus a meme. It is also an.org: rootstrikers.org. The organization mobilizesthis teaching and provides the resources to recruit

the teachers this movement needs to spread theunderstanding the Republic needs. Obviously, notliterally teachers: We’d welcome teachers, butalso doctors, and mothers, and banjo players, andmanagers of Starbucks.

Once these rootstrikers join the .org, the sitegives them a string of projects that they can engagein, either on their own or with others, eachdesigned to help spread this recognition. Theseprojects range from the simplest — taking andsharing an anti-corruption pledge, or sharing onTwitter corruption-related stories tied to the#rootstrikers tag — to the most demanding —remixing a presentation someone else gave andpresenting it to a group not yet committed.

Each project tries to teach one part of the morecomplete whole. In one, for example, volunteersask members of Congress and candidates forCongress to pledge not to become lobbyists oncethey leave Congress. And in the process ofexplaining the motivation behind this pledge, thelesson of this corruption is taught.

As people complete these projects, they move

up in the organization. As they move up, they helporganize others. Already there are a dozenrootstriker chapters in colleges and universitiesacross the country. To succeed, we must increasethat number by two orders of magnitude.

But this message will not spread in the rightway unless it is tied to the cross-partisanrecognition described in the last chapter. Peopleneed to become comfortable with a certain kind ofconversation: one that is confident about aspeaker’s own political views, but welcoming andencouraging of others.

Such an attitude is perfectly contrary to themodels for engagement that we see all around us.From the Huffington Post to the National ReviewOnline to the O’Reilly Factor or almost any showon MSNBC (Hayes is our only hope), the generalframe of modern media is snark. From any of thoseoutlets, the rest of the world is framed as crazy.Only “people like us” make sense. And thus itcould only ever make sense to hang and work andorganize with people like us.

Yet there are organizations trying hard to build

such an attitude. On the small scale, oneconversation at a time, these organizations push aconversation that explicitly tries to draw togetherfundamentally different people. That’s whatrootstrikers.org tries to do. It’s what Joan Blades,co-founder of MoveOn.org, has started with aproject called Living Room Conversations, whichdescribes itself as an open-source project toencourage small, informal, and respectfulconversations among people with very differentviews. In January, she co-hosted a conversationwith the co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, MarkMeckler, about the role of business in government.And likewise, Christopher Phillips has launchedan incredible project — The Constitution Café —to reconnect with ordinary citizens about themeaning and future of the constitution. As thewebsite describes it, “Constitution Café is a spacein which actual and aspiring Americans grapplewith how they would sculpt the United StatesConstitution if they could start from scratch.”79

These are precisely the places whererootstriking must happen — not just sponsored or

driven by an organization like rootstrikers, butpowered by the people who participate andinstigate these conversations, independently of ouror any one group. Again, the mantra: Not onegroup, but many; not one organization, but all.

This work is critical. But it doesn’t promiseany immediate or sexy return. There’s no electionor ballot or challenge, no flashy media. It doesn’tproduce a petition with 10 million signatures. Itdoesn’t command the attention of the President orPresident-wannabes.

But what it does is much more important. Itfloods a culture with a common meme. Arecognition that becomes second nature to all whothink about anything related to public policy. Itbuilds a public that can be leveraged to politicalchange, even if the building itself doesn’t on itsown effect any change. This is the politics ofbodysurfing: We prepare slowly but methodically,and then we wait for the wave that makes that workworth it.As groups

The work among individuals is crucial, but it

is partial and incomplete. Just as important is thework among groups — among the tens of thousandsof activist groups that are already deployed tochange policy. Whether on the Right or Left, thesegroups have enormous potential. They spend anincredible amount of energy pushing hard in thedirection they believe. And their hope, in the end,is to be able to mark their work with a victory forthe policy that they fight for.

These groups are not going to be converted tocorruption as their cause. Nor should they be.Greenpeace and the Sierra Club do a powerful jobof gathering and amplifying the passion that existsthroughout our culture for real and sustainableenvironmental policy. AARP does the same forissues that affect older Americans. (And hey, bythe way AARP, thanks for the card, but 50 is not“older Americans.”) Unions organize workers toimprove their working conditions. The AmericanConservative Union is the oldest conservativegrassroots organization in the nation, drawingtogether Americans “who are concerned with

liberty, personal responsibility, traditional values,and strong national defense.” All of these entitieshave a purpose. Corruption reform is not thatpurpose. And it is a mistake to believe thatchanging them to that purpose would make thisfight any easier.

Instead, the work we must do within thesegroups is to convince them not that corruption istheir most important issue. But that it is at leastnumber two. And that coalitions of these groupsneed to commit common resources to pushing this,their second most important issue. Let them alltithe. Let them commit 10 percent of their efforts— whether resources or energy — to advancingthis more fundamental fight, and that’s enough. Thatis all the tax this movement needs, but it iscrucially important that everyone who wouldbenefit from our success pay their tax.

For think about how much easier the work ofany of these groups will be, once the corruptionI’ve described has been remedied. When thepolicy fight over mercury in the air is a fight aboutthe facts first. Not the facts only — no doubt the

jobs that will be affected by properly protectingthe environment against poisons will weigh in thejudgment of any legislator. But that judgment won’tbe overwhelmed by the Skinner box of campaignfundraising. And if it is not overwhelmed, thenmaybe the right — meaning the correct —judgment might flourish.

This work is the responsibility of the membersof these organizations who are also rootstrikers.The membership must persuade the organization toreform. From the inside, the recognition must beinitiated and spread. For only if the organizationhears these demands from its own membershipwill the organization really reform. If there’s onething the 21st century has done to organizations ofall types, it is to make them at least potentiallymore responsive. For this is what technology wasbuilt for.

And there’s a second task for theseorganizations too — or at least those directlyengaged in the project of political reform. All ofthem must become aware of the needs of thisalliance. That doesn’t mean, again, giving up their

own identity. There will be distinctive parts to thismovement, distinctively Left and distinctivelyRight. But these different parts must allacknowledge a common framework. Again, not theframework of common ends. The framework of acommon enemy. And they must then at leastcomplement their own way of presenting the issuewith a frame that might include this wider politicalalliance.

This will take some toughtalk. MovetoAmend.org is a hero in this movement.But we need a MoveToAmendMoveToAmend.org(I’ve got the domain name if anyone’s up for this)— to get them to add to the mix of calls at least onethat could be embraced by more than the devotedLeft. Again, the aim is not “either/or.” The aim is“this/and.” Fight and organize for the“Corporations are not People” cause, for sure. Butadd to that mix a corruption cause, so that no oneneed doubt the potential for these disparateorganizations to eventually stand as one alliance.As candidates

This is, and must be, a movement of outsiders.

We need leaders in this movement who are notpoliticians, and not politician wannabes. We needcitizens to see other citizens standing up to reclaimtheir Republic, and doing something powerful withit.

But we also need insiders. Indeed, we willonly ever win once we persuade enough insiders toratify the demands that we will make by enactingthem into law. And so this movement must alsofind a way to encourage these insiders, and includethem. There must be a way that they can signal thatthey are part of this movement.

For some, that signal is obvious. Let thembehave as they would want the political system toallow them to behave. Let them commit, forexample, to taking small contributions only. Orrefusing to engage the Lesters. Or even openlyattacking the Lesters.

I’m not a believer in this strategy, at least notanymore. This is asking existing members ofCongress to lay down their weapons and fight forre-election with one arm tied behind their back.I’m not a supporter of unilateral disarmament. The

key to winning this fight is to win Congress. Andthe key to winning Congress is a set of campaignsby wannabe senators and Congress members thatcould actually win. These campaigns cost realmoney. Only very rarely will that real money beraised solely in small contributions. The vastmajority of candidates who disarm in advance lose— boldly, romantically, unjustly no doubt. But theylose. Buddy “free-to-lead” Roemer, who ran in the2012 Republican presidential primary, taking nomore than $100 from anyone; “Buck for Bob”Overbeek, who ran for Congress in Michigan,taking no more than $1 from anyone; or DorrisHaddock (aka “Granny D”), who walked acrossthe country in the name of campaign finance reformand then ran for Senate in New Hampshire in 2004,taking small contributions only — these are oursaints. But they are our saints because the politicalsystem slaughtered them.

So instead of disarming up front, I supportcommitment up front. A candidate should beforgiven for the (legal and ethical) tactics his orher campaign will have to engage in to win, so

long as he or she makes two critical commitments:First, that he or she will on day one of their servicein Congress co-sponsor the kind of reform I havedescribed. Second, that he or she will pledge notto serve as a lobbyist after leaving Congress.

Both are essential. We need to elect peoplewho are committed to changing the system. Weneed to remove the incentives to back away fromthat commitment. If 80 percent of Congress werecontractually disabled from serving as lobbyists,then it would be infinitely easier to ask Congressto change the way campaigns are funded. And themore we add to the mix of Congress who arecommitted to this kind of reform, the closer we areto the vote that will actually make this reform law:218 in the House, and 51 (or maybe 60 dependingupon the filibuster) in the Senate.As “the People”

Among the greatest challenges that we face insolving this problem is the utter lack of authoritywithin U.S. political society. I don’t mean power. Imean authority. Eighty percent of Americansbelieve that every change Congress had made to

“reform” the system has actually been made tofurther protect Congress.80 People don’t trustCongress, so even if Congress came up with thevery best possible plan for ending this corruption,we wouldn’t buy it because we don’t believe them.Congress is not an authority for us, even if it hasbrutal power over us.

Nor are the media an authority for us. Nor lawprofessors. Nor the million activist organizationstrying to rally our support. Nor the church. NorHollywood. Nor even Stephen Colbert. We live inan age of such deep skepticism that we have noinstitution capable of offering to us — We, thePeople — a plan that we would trust.

This is a fundamental problem, and it requirescreative thinking. If there’s no authority that can atleast advise us about what we should do, there’slittle chance that we’ll rally the supermajority itwill take to take on the entity with the most powerin our political system (even if also the most hated)— K Street and its supplicants.

So we need to build something that might earnour trust, at least enough to encourage us to pay

attention. Here is just one idea for how such a thingmight be built.

Think about an institution as old as theRepublic: the jury. Our tradition gave juriesincredible power. The constitution requires that aGrand Jury concur before the federal governmentis allowed to prosecute anyone. Think of it thisway: We, the People, as represented through theGrand Jury, must concur with the governmentbefore the government is allowed to prosecute oneof us. The same with the Petit Jury, which decidesguilt or innocence. Once again: We, the people, asrepresented through that Petit Jury, must agree withthe government before the government is allowedto punish one of us. In both cases, the people arerepresented in a nonpermanent, amateur body tostand between the citizens and the government, andthereby keep the government in check.

Juries do their work by deliberating. Evidenceis presented to them, and then they chew on it andcome up with a conclusion. Sometimes thosedeliberations are constructive; often they are ajoke. But the idea behind the jury system is that we

entrust this incredible state power — essential to aprosecution, and conviction — to ordinaryindividuals given a fair chance to hear theevidence and deliberate. That is, we trust amateursto decide how the professional power ofgovernment gets deployed.

There are lots of flaws with the jury system asit has developed. If the jury is really to representus, it does a pretty poor job. In theory, a smallgroup can represent a large group (think of anopinion poll that can accurately capture the viewsof millions by speaking only to a thousand). Butthat small group can’t be too small (and 12 iscertainly too small), and it must be randomlyselected (and juries are miles from a random crosssection of the country). So from the standpoint ofstatistics, the jury is a flawed institution, even iffrom the standpoint of civics, it captures somethingimportant about how self-government is supposedto work.

So imagine we fixed the problems with a jury— not for the courts, but for our democracy.Imagine, first, that it was larger — let’s say 300

rather than 12, meeting in small groups, then alltogether — and imagine, second, that it wasactually randomly selected and representative. Andimagine, finally, that we convened such a jury —call it a citizen convention — and without giving itany actual legal power, we asked it to deliberateabout how best to address the corruption that I’vedescribed. We would give it evidence and achance to hear both sides. And then we would let itchew on that evidence, and decide what responsewould work best.

Now imagine we did this four or five times, indifferent regions of the nation, all presented withthe same evidence, all given the same opportunityto deliberate.

These conventions would produce sometangible proposals. And though I hail from the eliteof the legal academy, I am 100 percent certain that,if constituted correctly, the proposals they wouldproduce would be miles ahead of anything thatwould come from politicians. Not becausepoliticians are stupid or evil or corrupt. Butbecause politicians are experts in thinking about

the special interests they depend upon. And thejudgment we need here is one devoid of suchspecial interests.

Tangible, sensible, and, I would also predict,consistent, these proposals could then provide abaseline for reform against which everything elsewould be measured. Maybe the proposals wouldbe flawed in a particular way. Certainly,politicians or interest groups should be allowed tosay why. But if I’m right, and if the work of thesedifferent groups cohered on a common core ofreform, it would be very hard to convince most thatthose proposals were wrong. I have no faith inopinion polls about complex issues of governance,and I’d be terrified to have my liberty held in thehands of many of the actual juries that decidedefendants’ fates. But I have complete faith that arandomly selected and sufficiently large body ofordinary citizens, properly informed, couldidentify the reforms that would make this Republicwork.

We need the authority such a process wouldproduce. To get it would require a statute that

established these conventions, protected thedelegates (both financially and legally), and forcedCongress to consider whatever they propose. I’vedescribed the details of such a bill elsewhere.81

Getting Congress to enact it would be incrediblyimportant to this movement. It would give us astake and a voice in this debate, a debate that’snow dominated by too many who would preservethe status quo.As funders

And finally, we need to embrace irony, and torecognize that only big money will defeat thesystem that big money controls. The campaign tochange the way Washington works will beenormously costly. That cost will be bornedisproportionately by the wealthiest in our society.And the challenge will be whether we can recruitenough of that wealth to make this fight feasible.

For let’s be clear about just how hard this fightwill be. If we win, K Street shrinks. It doesn’tdisappear, but it becomes much smaller. And muchless lucrative.

As we get closer to winning, like a wildcat

sensing a bear, K Street will respond. Recognizingthe threat that this reform presents, it will begin theprocess of defending itself. Of neutralizing oursupport, and building the barricades of defense.

We need to be able to fight that defense, andwin. That fight will ultimately require votes. But itw i l l immediately require an incrediblecommitment of cash. To win this fight will requirea fund bigger than any we have ever seen in anypolitical campaign. And to construct such a fundwill require an unprecedented level of supportfrom — you guessed it — the Lesters.

Of course, not just the Lesters. All of us, too.But even with all of us, the heaviest burden will beborne by those who can afford to carry the most.

The trick here is to make it make sense tocommit the resources this fight will need. And todo that, we need to borrow an ideafrom Kickstarter.

Kickstarter (as I hope and expect you know) isan incredible apparatus for funding art and culturalcreativity. It works through a mechanism ofcontingent commitments. An artist describes a

project and names a figure for how much thatproject will cost. Members of the Kickstartercommunity then pledge some amount toward thatcost. But that pledge is contingent: You only pay ifthe target is met (within the time set by theproject). If the target is met, your credit card getscharged. If it isn’t, you get a thank-you email andthat’s it.

The idea seems simple enough. Its effect hasbeen dramatic. If I asked you to compare the totalamount raised by Kickstarter last year to the totalamount spent by the National Endowment for theArts, what would you think the fraction would be,Kickstarter to NEA? Would you guess 10 percent?20 percent? 80 percent? The answer is more than100 percent. More money was raised byKickstarter to support new art — completelyvoluntarily — than the total budget of the NEA.82

We need to do the same with corruptionreform. All of us might rationally believe that ourgovernment needs this change, yet still do nothingto support that change, because we also rationallybelieve the fight is too difficult, and the resources

too scarce. Even if you’re Bill Gates and you cometo believe that every cause you’re working forwould be massively easier if only our governmentweren’t corrupt, still you wouldn’t write a checkfor $10 million to fight that corruption, because$10 million is chump change in that larger fight.

But what if you were Bill Gates and wereconvinced that 49 others would write that checktoo? And what if we could then get somethingcomparable at each level of wealth — each callingupon a relatively small number at that level tomake relatively large commitments, given theirwealth?

Pretty quickly, these numbers add up, andwithout imagining anyone making a really crazilylarge commitment. (For example: 50 people @ $10million plus 1,000 @ $1 million plus 100,000 @$10,000 plus 1 million @ $100 equals $2.6billion).

This idea is now being explored by animportant new organization founded by ArnoldHiatt (yes the same), called Fund for theRepublic.83 The Fund for the Republic in the short

term will raise money to help feed and grow thisnascent reform movement. Not money for itself, butmoney for other organizations. The Fund aims to bea clearinghouse, inspiring and supporting the workthis reform movement will take.

But the Fund is also thinking about thisKickstarter mechanism — commissioning first ananalysis by presidential-level campaigners of whata fight to win this issue would actually cost. Andonce that number is known, it would devise the mixof commitments necessary to build that bomb.

Call it “Project Irony” (but please keep itsecret, or at least don’t tell K Street). If it works,then a couple years before the New Hampshireprimary, this project would announce that it has avery big bomb — a SuperPAC to end allSuperPACs. That bomb would then be deployed inthat election for the purpose of building a Congresscommitted to reform and electing a president whowill assure that they carry through on theircommitment.

Now political pundits will say that such acampaign could never work. “People don’t care

about process,” these pundits insist. “People careabout issues. And campaign finance reform — oreven ‘corruption’ — isn’t the sort of issue thatpeople care about.”

This view is repeated so often that even Ibelieved it. But it’s total malarky. What’s true ist ha t politically active people like issues, orprograms. To the politically active, a Bill ClintonState of the Union Address — filled with policyprescription after policy prescription, like atedious PowerPoint presentation, with every issuedrained of its emotion and repackaged as a simplebullet point — is utopia. To the politically active,choosing a candidate is like mixing paint for theliving room: a bit more red or a bit more blue.Politics for them is the debating society writ large.

But the politically active Americans are a tinyslice of America. Most Americans hate politics.They hate arguments about substantive issues. Theyhate having to pick among the 52 types of politicaltoothpaste that the policy wonks put forward.

Most Americans care, instead, as Hibbing andTheiss-Morse have shown,84 about process, not

substance. Americans hate their government, butthat “dissatisfaction ... stems from perceptions ofhow government goes about its business, not whatthe government does.”85 And Americans see theirgovernment — or at least Congress — as afundamentally corrupted system. People “believespecial interest have hijacked the politicalprocess”; they believe “special interests andelected officials ... reap personal gains at theexpense of ordinary people like themselves”; andthey believe that the “bickering and the lack ofproductivity” that they see is due to “specialinterest influence.”86 Not because they believeCongress is filled with criminals. Indeed, ordinarypeople believe politicians “are knowledgeable andinformed.” But they also believe them to have been“sucked into a situation in which their self-interestand advantageous position” lead them to behaveagainst the public interest.87 All of which meansthat “Americans support reforming the politicalsystem ... a great deal” according to theHibbing/Theiss-Morse data.88

Normal politicians (and, more important, theircampaign managers) don’t notice this about theAmerican people because they’re not actuallyrunning campaigns that target the American people.They target the small subset of Americans who arepolitically active. Campaigns target the peoplethey can get to vote for the candidate they’repromoting. But most Americans don’t vote. And inmost elections, the people being targeted are verydifferent from America generally.

Yet if a campaign could bring some of themore normal Americans back into the politicalprocess — at least for the purpose of fixing it — itwould have enormous potential. And indeed, thislast election showed just that. Jonathan Soros, sonof George Soros, launched a SuperPAC thattargeted eight Congress members from both partieswho were particularly bad from the corruptionperspective. That SuperPAC, Friends ofDemocracy, ran ads that highlighted the way inwhich those incumbents had caved to specialinterests. And spending a relatively small amountof money ($2.4 million in all eight races), it helped

defeat seven of the eight. By the end of thatcampaign, voters in those districts rankedaddressing corruption as the most important issue,and three-fourths of the voters urgently wantedCongress to address the issue of money in politics.Speak to the country credibly about what all of thecountry cares about, and voters will respond.

But for this strategy to work, the campaignwould need a leader. A candidate for Presidentwho made this his or her issue. A candidate whowas credible and who would win. So who couldthat candidate be?

If it’s an ordinary politician, then as aDemocrat � hard as this is for me to confess � Ibelieve that only Nixon can go to China. I believe,that is, that it will take a Republican to make thishis or her issue, if indeed this issue has any hopeof passing our Congress. While Democrats andRepublicans are equally guilty of the sin that thiscorruption is, Democrats have taken the lead inpushing the reform that would end this corruption.Yet if fundamental reform requires a cross-partisanmovement (as I certainly believe it does),

ironically, the Democrats will only ever be able todeliver on their reform promise if there’s aRepublican at the top who is making the case forthem. For some reason, “fairness” and “equality”and a “fight against corruption” sound less scary tomost Americans when uttered from the Right. Callit poetic injustice if you must. I call it reality.

But it might be that the best strategy is for anonpolitician, or at least a very unique politician,to run — not to be an ordinary President. Instead,he or she would be a Trustee, or what I’ve called aRegent President. In Republic, Lost, I describe theRegent Presidency — the idea of a candidate whopromises, if elected, to do one thing, and thenresign. That one thing would be this reform: to rideto victory on the promise to end this corruption; tostay in power long enough to force Congress toratify that victory by enacting laws that will endthis corruption; and then, Cincinnatus-like, toresign, and return to private life.

This felt like a crazy idea when I first wrote it.More made for Hollywood than made for D.C. Butin fact, in other countries at least, just such a

reform has occurred. In Georgia, for example —the Republic, not the State — the current primeminister is someone who a year ago wascompletely unknown in Georgian politics. He wasa billionaire, someone enormously successful inbusiness. But he was a recluse billionaire, livingin a Georgian village, disengaged from public life.then, last year, he became convinced that thecurrent president (someone he had supported) wasevolving into something of a dictator. And heannounced that he would help build an oppositionparty and run that coalition against the president’sparty in the 2012 elections. And here was the key:He promised that if he won, he would be atemporary prime minister, serving only as long asnecessary to assure that the evolution todictatorship was avoided. His party wonoverwhelmingly. The current president acceptedhis fate. And Georgia may well be on the way toestablishing the first real democracy in the post-Soviet era.

The United States obviously is not Georgia.Yet the key in this story is not specific to Georgia.

It is a point about how people respond to a clearpromise of credible change. People care abouttheir democracy. They don’t know what the Feddoes, or how many senators there are from eachstate, but they want a government that works. Andmost of all they want to believe their government isnot being sold to the highest bidder. Those peoplerespond to credible campaigns for reform —everywhere.

Of course we’ve had “reformer” after“reformer” in U.S. politics. Everyone promises“change.” And most with any perspective on thisbattle recognize that “change” is just an electionslogan. That once a party gets in power, there aretoo many distractions to keep them focused on thisnebulous idea of reform.

But if a President were to be measured on onedimension only — if there were just a singlestandard for knowing whether he or she hadsucceeded — it would make it incredibly difficultfor the President to not “take up that fight,” andgive it her all. And that in turn would make iteasier for the rest of us to believe that this was a

fight worth waging. This is why he or she mustresign after achieving the change promised: itmakes the promise believable. And if tied to alarge enough catalyst fund, if led by credibleenough leader, it might just be possible forAmericans to pull together the energy they need tomake this a campaign we could win.

This, at least, is what we must do if we’re totry. Small change hasn’t gone anywhere. Reformershave been tinkering for 30 years, but the problemshave only gotten worse. That’s because reform likethis needs to achieve an escape velocity.Kickstarting a catalyst fund might produceprecisely enough energy to get such a movementfor real reform off the ground.

Possible

Yet still, in the end, no matter how hard anyonetries, most people remain in the place where thisbook began: Change, they believe, is not possible.Especially the pundits and politicians, andespecially people inside the Beltway. “You haveno idea how powerful K Street is,” I was told byone such insider. “You have no idea how hard it isto build a grassroots, political movement,” saidanother.

But the more I’ve thought about this issue, andtalked about it in literally hundreds of venuesacross the country, the more I’ve come to think thatwhether it is “possible” or not is just irrelevant.

I first saw this irrelevance in an exchange Idescribed in my book, Republic, Lost. After alecture at Dartmouth, a woman in the audiencesaid, “What’s the point? It all seems so hopeless.”

When she said this, I scrambled. I tried to finda way to respond to that hopelessness. What hit mewas an image of my (then) 6-year-old son. Iimagined a doctor coming to me and saying, “Your

son has terminal brain cancer, and there’s nothingyou can do.”

And I thought, would I do nothing? Would Ijust accept it? Would I give up?

Think about that for a second. Take the imageof a person you love most, and imagine thescenario I did. And then ask yourself, would youdo nothing?

The answer is that you would not. You wouldnot give up. You would do everything you could tosave that person’s life.

We do this because this is what love means.That the odds are irrelevant, and that you dowhatever the hell you can, the odds be damned.

And then, in that Dartmouth lecture hall, I sawthe obvious link: because even we liberals lovethis country. And so when the pundits and thepoliticians say that change is impossible, what thislove of country says back is that is just irrelevant.We lose something dear, something every one of uscherishes, if we lose this Republic. And so we act,with everything we can, we act out of love, toprove these pundits wrong.

So here’s the question for you: Do you havethat love?

Because if you do, then what the hell are you— what the hell are we — doing about it? For it?And for this Republic?

When Ben Franklin was carried from theconstitutional convention in September of 1787, hewas stopped by a woman on the streets ofPhiladelphia and asked, “Well, Doctor, what havewe got?” Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you cankeep it.”89

A Republic. A representative democracy. Agovernment “dependent upon the People alone.”

We have lost that Republic. And now all of usmust act to get it back. Through love, and throughthe terrifying political force that the people can atleast sometimes muster.

Great .orgs you can help now

As I’ve argued, this isn’t a movement with a singleleader. Nor should it be. There are many in thismovement, and many in it for many years. Some,l i ke Democracy21, are traditional, inside-the-beltway reform organizations. But there are manymore keen to engage a wider audience in thisreform movement. Here are some of the leaders.

Transparency: Groups focused on making thedata about influence more accessible

MapLightNational Institute on Money in State PoliticsOpenSecrets.orgThe Sunlight Foundation

Funding: Groups focused primarily on

organizing to change the way elections arefunded

Americans for Campaign ReformCampaign Finance InstituteCommon CauseDemocracy MattersDēmosFriends of Democracy (a SuperPAC to end

SuperPACs)People for the American WayPublic CampaignPublic CitizenRootstrikersThe Other 98%United RepublicU.S. PIRG

Amendment: Groups pushing for aconstitutional amendment

United for the People (wonderful umbrella

site)Common CauseFree Speech for PeopleMove to AmendPeople for the American WayPublic CitizenThe Other 98%

Endnotes

The links in these notes are live as of March 25,2013. But as links on the Web are highly unstable,we built a site with all of the links archived. If youhave any trouble with the links in this book, youcan find the archive by the link number ("link#")at lesterland.lessig.org.

1. For those worried about the details, imagine thepower is given to people named Lester as of acertain date, one year before Lesterland wasfounded. And to deal with the sad fact that Lestersdie, imagine that each family with a parent namedLester could qualify one of its children, male orfemale, as a Lester, with all the privileges thatLesterdom entails. By “directly related,”Lesterland limits the franchise to people namedLester, married to people named Lester, thechildren (over 18) of people named Lester, and the

parents of a person named Lester. Assume the totalnumber, on average, of people “directly related” toa Lester is four. So while Lesters make up only0.05 percent of the population of Lesterland, thoseentitled to vote in the Lester election constituteabout 0.25 percent of the total population.

Finally, full disclosure: My first name isLester. I therefore claim the right to play with thisvery unusual name.

2. 558 U.S. 310 ___ (2010) (slip. op., at 44),accessed March 25, 2012 (link #0).

3. Calculation of Professor Paul Jorgensen,University of Texas-Pan American, on file withauthor.

4. B. Bowie and A. Lioz, Billion-DollarDemocracy: The Unprecedented Role of Moneyin the 2012 Elections (New York: Dēmos andU.S. PIRG Education Fund, January 2013), 18,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #1).

5 . “Donor Demographics,” 2010,OpenSecrets.org, The Center for ResponsivePolitics, accessed March 25, 2013 (link #2). Asmy focus is Congress, I have used the numbers

from the most recent congressional election. Thenumber of Lesters giving money to congressionalcandidates in 2012 is even lower.

6. In the TED Talk, I was relying upon olderdata. The updated number — 99 Americans — iscalculated in Billion-Dollar Democracy, page 30(see note 4 above; link #1).

7. The most obvious earlier parallel toLesterland in U.S. history is the “white primaries”that dominated in the South until the early part ofthe 20th century. Under those systems, the“private” Democratic Party held a primary todetermine which candidate would represent theDemocratic Party in the general election. Thoseprivate primaries were restricted to whites only.When the Supreme Court finally decided to hearthe complaints of black voters, it didn’t much workfor the Court to recognize that whites in the Southhad effectively changed “the mode of choice froma single step, a general election, to two, of whichthe first is the choice at a primary of thosecandidates from whom, as a second step, therepresentative in Congress is to be chosen at the

election.” That separation made candidates forCongress no longer dependent upon the peoplealone, but also, and primarily, dependent uponwhite voters. In United States v. Classic, the Courtheld that competing dependence unconstitutional.United States v. Classic, 313 U.S. 299, 324(1941).

8. L. Lessig, Republic, Lost: How MoneyCorrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It (NewYork: Twelve, 2011), 138.

9. M. Schram, Speaking Freely: FormerMembers of Congress Talk about Money inPolitics (Washington, D.C.: Center for ResponsivePolitics, 1995), 12.

10. Lessig, Republic, Lost, 228.11. Z.S. Brugman, “The Bipartisan Promise of

1776: The Republican Form and Its Manner ofElection” (paper, Social Science ResearchNetwork, 2012), 30, accessed March 25, 2013(link #3).

12. J. Madison, The Federalist No.41, “General View of the Powers Conferred by theConstitution,” Independent Journal, from the

Project Gutenberg Etext, accessed March 25, 2013(link #4).

13. E. Risch, Supplying Washington’s Army(Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History,U.S. Army, 1981), 64., accessed March 25, 2013(link #5).

14. As Dēmos reports, citing a study fundedby the Joyce Foundation, “large donors aresignificantly more conservative than the generalpublic on economic matters.” Bowie and Lioz,Billion-Dollar Democracy, 15 (see note 4 above;link #1).

In 1996, according to the study, 81 percent ofthose who gave $200 or more had family incomesgreater than $100,000, making them richer than 95percent of America. Ninety-five percent ofcontributors were white, and 80 percent were men.Ibid.

15. For a while it seemed that SheldonAdelson, for example, was spending his millionssimply to support his view of the public good ofsupporting Israel. It turned out later, as hesuggested, that he was actually also quite

interested in assuring a new Justice Departmentthat wouldn’t be as eager to pursue, among otherthings, crimes that he has suggested his companymay have committed. M. Allen, “Sheldon Adelson:Inside the Mind of the Mega-Donor,” Politico,Sept. 23, 2012, accessed March 25, 2013 (link#6); and I. Volsky, “GOP’s Largest CampaignContributor Admits to Bribing ForeignOfficials,” ThinkProgress , accessed March 25,2013 (link #7).

16. A.C. Brooks, “A Nation of Givers,” TheAmerican, March/April 2008, accessed March 25,2013 (link #8). “Total giving to charitableorganizations was $298.42 billion in 2011 (about2 percent of GDP).” Also see World Giving Index2011: A Global View of Giving Trends , CharitiesAid Foundation, 2011, accessed March 25, 2013(link #9).

17. OpenSecrets.org, accessed March 25,2013 (links #10, 11, 12, and 13).

18. W. Buffet, “Warren Buffet onDerivatives,” summary from Hathaway AnnualReport (2002), accessed March 25, 2013 (link

#14).19. J. Leibenluft, “$596 Trillion!,” Slate, Oct.

15, 2008, accessed March 25, 2013 (link #15).2 0 . WikiQuote, s.v. “Daniel Patrick

Moynihan,” last modified Nov. 10, 2011, accessedMarch 25, 2013 (link #16).

21. M. Gilens, Affluence and Influence(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,2012), 74, 81 (emphases added). As Gilenssummarizes the data:

The American government does respond to thepublic’s preferences, but that responsiveness isstrongly tilted toward the most affluent citizens.Indeed, under most circumstances, the preferences ofthe vast majority of Americans appear to haveessentially no impact on which policies thegovernment does or doesn’t adopt.

Gilens, Affluence and Influence, 1 (emphasisadded).

22. T. Stratmann, “Campaign Contributionsand Congressional Voting: Does the Timing ofContributions Matter?,” Review of Economics &

Statistics 77 (1995): 127, 135 (studyingagricultural subsidies); and Thomas Stratmann,“The Market for Congressional Votes: Is Timing ofContributions Everything?,” 41 J.L. & Econ. 85(1998): 109-10 (“[T]he date of a legislative eventis an important determinant of the timing ofcontributions ... [and] the timing suggests that themotive to influence legislative decisions isimportant.”).

23. R.G. Rajan and L. Zingales, SavingCapitalism from the Capitalists (New York:Crown Business, 2003), 92.

24. C. Russell, TED Talk, accessed March25, 2013 (link #17).

25. Our framers had a much more subtle senseof “corruption” than we do. Though there was asense of corruption that described individuals, thatwas the exception, not the rule. As Lisa Hilldescribes it, “Corruption was not so much anindividualized breach of duties as a condition thatspread contagiously and diffusely throughout thepolity affecting leaders and citizens alike.” L. Hill,“Adam Smith and the Theme of Corruption,”

Review of Politics 68 (Fall 2006): 636-637. Thiswas also the frame through which Adam Smiththought about the problem. Hill states that “thoughSmith seems aware of the problem of corruption onan individual level, he sees the issue as more of asystemic problem, focusing almost exclusively onits legalized and normal forms,” page 650.

26. J. Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren(New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009), 59.

27. Lessig, Republic, Lost, 197.2 8 . “Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 Proposal,” Tax

Policy Center, accessed March 25, 2013 (link#18); R. Perry, “My Tax and Spending ReformPlan,” Wall Street Journal , Oct. 25, 2011,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #19).

29. G. Kessler, “John Boehner’s Misfire onthe Cost of Tax Compliance,” Washington Post ,Nov. 16, 2011, accessed March 25, 2013 (link#20).

30. J.D. McKinnon, G. Fields, and L.Saunders, “‘Temporary Tax’ Code Puts Nation inLasting Bind,” Wall Street Journal , Dec. 14,2010, accessed March 25, 2013 (link #21).

3 1 . “An R&D Tax Credit thatWorks,” Institute for Policy Innovation, accessedMarch 25, 2013 (link #22).

32. See, e.g., T.E. Mann and N.J. Ornstein,It’s Even Worse than It Looks (New York: BasicBooks, 2012), 45.

33. See, e.g., S. James, “Ending the Export-Import Bank,” Downsizing the FederalGovernment, Cato Institute, October 2012,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #23); and R.Grim, “Koch Brothers, Grover Norquist Split OnEthanol Subsidies,” Huffington Post, updated Aug.13, 2011, accessed March 25, 2013 (link #24).

3 4 . “Big Sugar Wins in theSenate,” Downsizing the Federal Government,Cato Institute, accessed March 25, 2013 (link#25).

35. Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse thanIt Looks, 46. The causal claim made here iscontested. See M. Yglesias, “Gerrymandering andPolarization,” ThinkProgress, accessed March 25,2013 (link #26).

36. Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse than

It Looks, 101.37. Ibid., 80.38. L. Fang, “Lobbyists Who Profit from

Senate Dysfunction Fight Filibuster Reform,” TheNation, accessed March 25, 2013 (emphasisadded) (link #27). The now deleted page can beseen at the Internet Archive, accessed March 25,2013 (link #28).

39. C. Ho, “Former Sen. Jon Kyl Joins LobbyShop at Covington,” Capital Business Blog,Washington Post, March 6, 2013, accessed March25, 2013 (link #29).

40. T. Wilson, “Yup, I Built a Nuclear FusionReactor,” TED Talk, accessed March 25, 2013(link #30).

41. Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse thanIt Looks, 101.

42. See, for example, M. Corak, “Chasing theSame Dream, Climbing Different Ladders:Economic Mobility in the United States andCanada” (Economic Mobility Initiative: AnInitiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, 2009), 7.The study ranked the United States 10th in

intergenerational mobility out of 12 countriesstudied and was cited in J.S. Hacker and P.Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics (New York:Simon & Schuster, 2010), 29. See also J.B.Isaacs, “Economic Mobility of Families AcrossGenerations,” (Economic Mobility Project: AnInitiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, 2007), 5,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #49)(“Surprisingly, American children from low-income families appear to have less mobility thantheir counterparts in five northern Europeancountries.”).

43. S. Christ, “Which Companies Spend theMost on Advertising?,” accessed March 25, 2013(link #31).

44. The qualification “sways” turns upon howthe Supreme Court applies its decision in R.A.V. v.City of St. Paul, Minnesota, 505 U.S. 377 (1992),in which the Court held that even unprotectedspeech couldn’t be regulated in a viewpoint-basedway. But how that principle would apply tosomething deemed “not speech” is uncertain.

45. See the extensive and wonderful analysis

in Jeffrey D. Clements’ Corporations Are NotPeople (San Francisco: Berrett-KoehlerPublishers, 2012).

46. The story of what we need and why iscomplicated. See L. Lessig, “AgainstTransparency,” New Republic, Oct. 9, 2009,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #32).

47. J.R. Hibbing and E. Theiss-Morse, StealthDemocracy: Americans’ Beliefs about HowGovernment Should Work (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2002), 214. Theauthors report a study about the British House ofCommons that examined how the views of theCommons changed after debates in the Commonswere televised: “For every respondent whoclaimed his or her view of parliament hadimproved ... four said it had declined.”

Hibbing and Theiss-Morse have the utmostskepticism about the potential good fromtransparency, and they trace enthusiasm abouttransparency (naive, in their view) to JeremyBentham. As they put it, “Bentham (1839)supported publicizing every move made by

government because such a practice would, amongother things, motivate public officials to do theirduty. And Bentham believed that those whoopposed publicity must assume citizens areincompetent. Neither of these assertions withstandsscrutiny” (page 212).

48. It is not clear why we need to know whogave what, if we could know what kind of persongave what. So, for instance, as Bruce Cain hasproposed, a system of disclosure that would reportan amount given and the demographic informationof the giver would satisfy legitimate state interests.This view strikes me as correct. See B.Cain, “Shade from the Glare,” Cato Unbound,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #33).

49. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, StealthDemocracy, 213.

50. G. Epps, Wrong and Dangerous: TenRight-Wing Myths about Our Constitution(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,2012), 80. See also page 75: “Reversing‘corporate personhood’ won’t win the battleagainst toxic campaign funding.” Kent Greenfield

puts the point quite well: “Saying corporations arenot persons is as irrelevant to constitutionalanalysis as saying that Tom Brady does not puttwell.” K. Greenfield, “How to Make CitizensUnited Worse,” Washington Post , Jan. 19, 2012,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #34).

51. See Fair Elections Now Act, accessedMarch 25, 2013 (link #35).

52. See American Anti-CorruptionAct, accessed March 25, 2013 (link #36).

53. See Grassroots Democracy Act, accessedMarch 25, 2013 (link #37).

54. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, StealthDemocracy, 210.

55. J.M. Jones, “Confidence in U.S. PublicSchools at New Low,” Gallup, June 20, 2012,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #38).

56. L. Lessig, “A Reply to ProfessorHasen,” 126 Harvard Law Review Forum 61(2012), accessed March 25, 2013 (link #39).

57. There was no need for the Court to createthis trouble. As I describe in Republic, Lost, pages238-45, the only issue the Court needed to resolve

in that case was whether a nonprofit film companycould spend its corporate money to promote itsown film. In my view, the answer to that questionis simple, and it is yes. But instead, the Courtreached that conclusion through an opinion thatseems to hold that there’s nothing Congress can doto limit corporate influence in public elections.That conclusion, as I explain below, does notfollow.

Mann and Ornstein recount a similar story inIt’s Even Worse than It Looks (page 79):

As one Senator said to us, “We have all hadexperiences like the following: A lobbyist or interestrepresentative will be in my office. He or she willsay, ‘You know, Americans for a Better Americareally, really want this amendment passed. And theyhave more money than God. I don’t know what theywill do with their money if they don’t get what theywant. But they are capable of spending a fortune tomake anybody who disappoints them regret it.’ ” Nomoney has to be spent to get the desired outcome.

58. Blair and Lioz, Billion-DollarDemocracy.

59. Lessig, “A Reply to Professor Hasen.”6 0 . “Congressional Revolving Doors: The

Journey from Congress to K Street,” PublicCitizen’s Congress Watch, July 2005, accessedMarch 27, 2013 (link #50); and Republic Report,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #41).

61. R.A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson:The Passage of Power (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 2012), 4.

62. L. Lessig, One Way Forward (SanFrancisco: Byliner Inc., 2012), 52.

63. J.M. Jones, “Americans Want NextPresident to Prioritize Jobs, Corruption,” Gallup,July 30, 2012, accessed March 25, 2013 (link#42).

64. S. Mittal, “Important Voter Issues asAddressed on Presidential Candidate Websites,1996-2012,” Oct. 19, 2012, accessed March 25,2013 (link #43).

65. April 2, 2008, Philadelphia. Those of ushopeful that Obama would “take up that fight”were quickly disillusioned when he picked RahmEmanuel as chief of staff. As Michael Grunwald

describes, “Rahm agreed with Obama about thedysfunction of Washington — he called the city‘Fucknutsville’ — but he wasn’t interested intrying to change the game. He was interested inwinning.” M. Grunwald, The New New Deal: TheHidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 90.

66. Mittal, “Important Voter Issues.”67. D. Eggen, “Poll: Large Majority Opposes

Supreme Court Decision on CampaignFinancing,” Washington Post , Feb. 16, 2010,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #44).

68. See the list at united4thepeople.org (link#45).

69. Ibid.70. W.B. Murphy, “The National Progressive

Republican League and the Elusive Quest forProgressive Unity,” Journal of the Gilded Age andProgressive Era 8 (October 2009): 515, 528.

71. Ibid., 527.72. Ibid., 516.73. C. Carson, “The Unfinished Dialogue of

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X,” Souls 7

(Winter 2005): 12, 16.74. J.H. Cone, “Martin and Malcolm on

Nonviolence and Violence,” Phylon 49 (Autumn-Winter 2001): 173, 175.

75. Carson, “The Unfinished Dialogue,” 17.76. Cone, “Martin and Malcolm,” 173, 177.77. P. Schweizer, Throw Them All Out (New

York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade, 2011),104.

78. Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse thanIt Looks, 62. As the authors describe, the marketpressure toward media polarization is almostirresistible:

The Fox business model is based on securing andmaintaining a loyal audience of conservatives eager tohear the same message presented in different ways bydifferent hosts over and over again. MSNBC hasadopted the Fox model on the left, in a milder form.(page 60)

CNN has tried multiple business models, but hassettled on having regular showdowns pitting ... abedrock liberal against a bedrock conservative. ... Forviewers, there is reinforcement that the only dialogue

in the country is between polarized left and right.(pages 60-61)

79. See Constitution Cafédescription, accessed March 25, 2013 (link #46).

80. R. Faucheux, “U.S. Voters: Congress IsSelfish About Campaign Finance,” The Atlantic,July 16, 2012, accessed March 25, 2013 (link#51).

81. L. Lessig, “A Proposal to Convene aSeries of ‘Citizen Conventions,’ for ProposingAmendments to the Constitution,” testimony beforeSenate Judiciary Committee, July 24, 2012,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #47).

82. C. Franzen, “Kickstarter Expects toProvide More Funding to the Arts thanNEA,” Talking Points Memo , Feb. 24, 2012,accessed March 25, 2013 (link #48). The actualresults exceeded NEA’s budget by 75 percent (seelink #52).

83. Full disclosure: Fund for the Republicalso supports Rootstrikers.

84. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, Stealth

Democracy.85. Ibid., 35.86. Ibid., 105, 130, 122, 124.87. Ibid., 124.88. Ibid., 88. This approach also helps

explain the relatively strong view Americans haveof the Court. “The Supreme Court is relativelypopular not just because the justices hide theirinternal conflict from public view but mostlybecause their decisions are not perceived to affecttheir own material well-being.” See page 158.

89. W. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: AnAmerican Life (New York: Simon & Schuster,2004), 459.

Thanks

This book is an experiment. After giving my TEDtalk, I was inundated with kindness but withquestions. How could we bring about the changethat I said we needed? Who would lead it? Whatwould it take?

The brilliance of TED is that it introducesideas, and thereby enables them to spread. But in18 minutes, one can only explain so much. So Iwanted in this short book to take the framework ofmy TED talk and fill in some of the details.

The ideas in my talk and in this book havebeen developed over the past five years. Thefoundation is Republic, Lost: How MoneyCorrupts Congress — And a Plan to StopIt (Twelve, 2011), and I was grateful that Twelveallowed me the first version of an experiment likethis when Byliner Inc. published my ebook OneWay Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixingthe Republic (2012). One Way Forward , like thisbook, was a map of what we could do then. Thisbook is version two of that map, including part of

the original, updated to respond to changes in thepolitical landscape and reframed as my thinkinghas evolved.

I am especially grateful to Chris Anderson forallowing and then encouraging this experiment. Iam particularly grateful that, consistent with TED’svalues, he has permitted this to be licensed underthe Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerciallicense. (Share it freely, but speak to TED if youwant to sell it [or turn it into a major motionpicture!]).

The staff of TED Books has beenphenomenally helpful in producing this work. I amgrateful as well to my agent, Amanda Urban, fordoing what she does better than anyone in theworld, helping me think through the next stage inthe life of writing.

I am grateful too to the incredible Center forResponsive Politics (opensecrets.org) for helpwith the numbers. Also to Ming Cheung, SandraHanian, Alex Harris, Sonal Mittal, Nathan Reeves,Kyle Schneider, Steve Shaw, Matt Shuham, andespecially Michael Pierce for research support.

Thanks as well to Ari Borensztein for bothresearch and everything else support.

But the most thanks, as always, is to my partnerand confidant, who is always left with the burdenof my hard work elsewhere. To Bettina, everythingis dedicated.

Illustrations created with images fromshutterstock.com

About the author

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professorof Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School,and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center forEthics at Harvard University.

Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessigwas a professor at Stanford Law School, where hefounded the school’s Center for Internet andSociety, and at the University of Chicago.

He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice AntoninScalia on the United States Supreme Court. Lessigserves on the Board of the AXA Research Fund,and on the advisory boards of Creative Commonsand the Sunlight Foundation.

He is a Member of the American Academy ofArts and Sciences and the American PhilosophicalAssociation, and has received numerous awards,including the Free Software Foundation’s FreedomAward, Fastcase 50 Award, and being named oneof Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries.

Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in

management from the University of Pennsylvania,an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JDfrom Yale.

TED is a nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading.” It startedout, in 1984, as a conference bringing together people from three

worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope hasbecome ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — theTED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs, Calif., each

spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, eachsummer — TED includes the award-winning TED Talks video site,

the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiringTED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize. The

annual TED Conferences, in Long Beach/Palm Springs andEdinburgh, bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and

doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18minutes). On TED.com, we make the best talks and performancesfrom TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than1,000 TED Talks are available online, with more added each week.

All are subtitled in English; many are subtitled in various otherlanguages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons

license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. Lesterland: TheCorruption of Congress and How to End It. Copyright © April 2013

by Lawrence Lessig, this work is licensed under a CreativeCommons BY-NC license. Published in the United States by TEDConferences, LLC. For permission requests beyond that license,

contact the publisher at: TED Conferences, LLC 250 Hudson StreetNew York, NY 10013 TED.com Published simultaneously in the

United States and wherever access to Amazon, the iBookstore, andBarnes & Noble is available. Also available in TED Books appedition. First edition. First published April 2013. ISBN: 978-1-

937382-34-6. TED is a registered trademark, and the TED colophonis a trademark of TED Conferences, LLC.

Table of ContentsPreface 5Lesterland 7Worse 26Corrupt 41Known and ignored 60Fixes 66Farm leagues 85How 932do@now 126Possible 160Great .orgs you can help now 163Endnotes 166Thanks 187About the author 190

About TED 192